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How to setup bonding in SuSe Linux.

Posted June 17th, 2009 by gnulinux

In this article we will know how to setup network bonding in SuSE linux. I have seen that SuSe linux is also became popular choise withing GNU/Linux community so thaught why not have this key how-to in place. I've tested this on SuSe 9.1 and I belive it should work on most of other versions of SuSe with little or no change.

First of all we need to configure ethernet ports using SuSe utility called YAST (Yet Another System Tool) (yet-another-system-tool). Just activate your ethernet cards to accept IP address from DHCP. Don't worry if you do not have any dhcp server this is just for activating ethernet ports. you can even setup static IP if you do not want to use dhcp. When you activate ethernet cards it will create configuration files for ethernet devices in {/etc/sysconfig/network/ } directory. ethernet config file name will look like ifcfg-eth-id-[mac address]. yast will also generate a UNIQUE ID and add it in configuration file with _nm_name.

Now we need to modify configuration for the ethernet ports which we want to use for bonding. by default it will look like


    BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
    MTU=''
    REMOTE_IPADDR=''
    STARTMODE='onboot'
    UNIQUE='pBQ3.ZnqC7TPNdX0'
    _nm_name='bus-pci-0000:01:02.0'

Chage it to


    BOOTPROTO='none'
    STARTMODE='off'
    UNIQUE='pBQ3.ZnqC7TPNdX0'
    _nm_name='bus-pci-0000:01:02.0'

Note : Make sure that you don't change UNIQIE and _nm_name values.

Now we need to create a configuratino file for bond0 called ifcfg-bond0 in same place where you have other config files for ethernet devices. i.e. /etc/sysconfig/network.


    BOOTPROTO='static'
    BROADCAST='192.168.1.255'
    IPADDR='192.168.1.101'
    MTU=''
    NETMASK='255.255.255.0'
    NETWORK='192.168.1.0'
    REMOTE_IPADDR=''
    STARTMODE='onboot'
    BONDING_MASTER='yes'
    BONDING_MODULE_OPTS='miimon=100'
    BONDING_SLAVE0='eth0'
    BONDING_SLAVE1='eth1'

Note : Make sure you change values according to your requirement.

after you are satisfied with your configuration, restart network service and you should able to see network bonding up and running.

    /etc/init.d/network restart

The above example configures bond0 with mii monitor equal to 100 and mode active-backup. Adjust the IP

cheers!!

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