I have two machines, one running Red Hat Fedora Core 2, the other running Windows XP Pro. I happened to have some extra ethernet cards lying about, and decided to play around with link aggregation (a.k.a. channel bonding, port trunking, etc.). On the Linux side, I am using the bonding module in mode 4 (802.3ad), and on the Windows side I have NIC Express 4.0 installed and set for 802.3ad mode. The hosts are connected via two crossover cables. I've played around quite a bit, but haven't had much luck; at one point, I could ping from either host to the other with either or both cables connected, but couldn't do anything useful (SSH, HTTP) unless a particular card on the Windows box was plugged into either of the cards on the Linux box.
Is what I'm trying to do even possible with 802.3ad? If not, is it possible with another bonding mode? NIC Express supports a mode in which load balancing is disabled, and FEC/GEC trunking as well as
802.3ad, and a proprietary mode. The reason I was doing this was for the extra speed, but if that's not possible, I'd settle for just the fault tolerance.Some of the errors I've seen:
Linux:
- bonding: Warning: No 802.3ad response from the link partner for any adapters in the bond
Windows:
- Group NIC Express Aggregate Link has one or more interfaces connected to a switch that does not support 802.3ad trunking
- Group NIC Express Aggregate Link has a trunking mismatch Thanks,
Gabe