Bond with Adaptive Load Balancing on Ubuntu Server
I was wanting to setup my server with bonded network interface cards (NICs). Since it took me a while to get the bond working, I thought I do some notes to self here; added benefit of sharing with you all.
Configuration
This is my /etc/network/interfaces file:
You’ll notice that my NICs aren’t eth0, eth1, eth2, and eth3. Nope, that would be way too easy. In order to get the names of my NICs, I used: ip link show.
Decisions
I chose to use allow-hotplug on the NICs instead of auto. While booting with auto set, I was getting a significant delay: a start job is running for raise network interfaces (5 mins 1 sec). This is because auto causes the system to wait for DHCP relay, even if it’s set to manual.
Additionally, I chose to have my main NIC boot instantly while the other three NICs would wait five seconds (pre-up sleep 5). This is one method of ensuring that my main NIC was the one that the bond spoofed the mac address of. Another method would have been to specify the hwaddress in the bond; such as:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet manual
hwaddress fe:80:12:04:6d:6f
I hope this helps others out there in the ether!