I am thinking of bonding several ADSL connections at my house in order to get a faster upload speed to my servers.
Does anyone know of any good routers out there that could do this job (Cisco or HP would be preferred, but any brand is okay)?
This might win me the "stupidest idea 2008" award but I was wondering..
I have an active ADSL line at home but I don't have an active account at an ISP.. Could I somehow get Internet access through my VPS (for a week or so, till my new ISP activates my account)?
I just stumbled across mention of bonding two NICs to serve as one. (E.g., 100Mbps NIC + 100Mbps NIC = 'virtual' 200 Mbps NIC, as far as everything on the network is concerned.)
I'd been familiar with the concept for quite some time, but I guess I never really thought it through until just now...
How does this work with switches? It seems to me that the answer should be a flat, "It doesn't." But it seems that it does work. How does the switch merrily map an IP to two different ports? Do the two NICs maintain their MACs? (Wouldn't two MACs to one IP cause even more problems?)
I thought with 802.3ad I could aggregate the links and thus turn a 3x100 megabit pipes to one 300 meg pipe. The problem is when using the default options (and layer2 xmit mode) I only get the bandwidth of a single connection and I see no other traffic on the other two. Here is output from /proc/net/bonding/bond0:
Code:
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.3.0 (June 10, 2008)
Bonding Mode: IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation
Transmit Hash Policy: layer2 (0)
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0
802.3ad info
LACP rate: slow
Active Aggregator Info:
Aggregator ID: 2
Number of ports: 3
Actor Key: 9
Partner Key: 3
Partner Mac Address: 00:1e:f6:xx:xx:xx
Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:1e:8c:xx:xx:xx
Aggregator ID: 1
Slave Interface: eth2
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:04:23:xx:xx:xx
Aggregator ID: 1
Slave Interface: eth3
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:04:23:xx:xx:xx
Aggregator ID: 1
Basically it works in that I get a connection but its no different from being on a regular 100/100 connection. Downloading files my machine from completely different networks always only goes out one connection. I don't even see any received/sent packets from the other two interfaces.
When I tell it to use layer3+4 via the xmit_hash_policy paramter when loading the module IE:
modprobe bonding mode=4 xmit_hash_policy=layer3+4 miimon=100
It seems to work as expected except it looks like all incomming traffic comes in on the same interface and its not much different from a normal load balancing (except from a single IP address). I will stick to this method if I have no choice as I don't really care about the download all that much and it seems to do a good job.
Here is /proc/net/bonding/bond0 from that config:
Code:
Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.3.0 (June 10, 2008)
Bonding Mode: IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation
Transmit Hash Policy: layer3+4 (1)
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0
802.3ad info
LACP rate: slow
Active Aggregator Info:
Aggregator ID: 2
Number of ports: 3
Actor Key: 9
Partner Key: 3
Partner Mac Address: 00:1e:f6:xx:xx:xx
Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:1e:8c:xx:xx:xx
Aggregator ID: 2
Slave Interface: eth2
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:04:23:xx:xx:xx
Aggregator ID: 2
Slave Interface: eth3
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:04:23:xx:xx:xx
Aggregator ID: 2
My understanding is that with layer2 it should just be one big fat pipe. IE: packets are fragmented and thus even a single connection should be able to sustain 300 megabits (if the other end could provide it). It seems like it just doesn't use my other interfaces at all when doing this.
Here is my config on the cisco 2960:
Code:
interface Port-channel3
switchport access vlan 100
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100
switchport mode access
switchport nonegotiate
spanning-tree portfast
!
interface FastEthernet0/10
switchport access vlan 100
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100
switchport mode access
switchport nonegotiate
channel-protocol lacp
channel-group 3 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
!
interface FastEthernet0/38
switchport access vlan 100
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100
switchport mode access
switchport nonegotiate
channel-protocol lacp
channel-group 3 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
!
interface FastEthernet0/40
switchport access vlan 100
switchport trunk allowed vlan 100
switchport mode access
switchport nonegotiate
channel-protocol lacp
channel-group 3 mode active
spanning-tree portfast