# [SOLVED] NIC Bonding help

## BlueFusion

I have two Gentoo boxes I'm trying to bond ports on using balance-rr.

area51 has 2x 1Gbps NICs

phoenix has 3x 1Gbps NICs (only two in use)

When transferring data, I can achieve only single-port speeds.  Watching dstat, data is sent out over two NICs from the sending computer but is received by only one port on the other computer.  This is true of sending data in either direction (area51 => phoenix or phoenix=> area51).

I'm using a NEtgear GS724TR "smart" switch and the two LAGs are configured as static, not LACP.

Ideas?

 *Quote:*   

> rich@area51 ~ $ cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 
> 
> Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.7.1 (April 27, 2011)
> 
> Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)
> ...

 

 *Quote:*   

> rich@phoenix ~ $ cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 
> 
> Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.7.1 (April 27, 2011)
> 
> Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)
> ...

 Last edited by BlueFusion on Tue Oct 13, 2015 4:40 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## szatox

AFAIR for round robin you must either have switches aware of this mode, or have a separate network for every port in the bond.

Cheap, stupit switches map MAC on a single port and will route all traffic to this MAC over that single port.

There are ither modes that only require the other endpoint to cooperate with you. Unfortunately those rely on hashing layer2/3 parameters, so you need at least multiple connections on different ports to have any use of it. And multiple peers are preffaired.

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## BlueFusion

Thanks for the helpful hint.

I disabled LAG and created 2 new VLANs on the switch.  I put the first port of each PC in the first VLAN and the second port of each PC in the second VLAN.  I am still using balance-rr.  I can now get 180-205MB/sec with ncat.

 :Cool: 

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## BlueFusion

Quick update.

The multiple VLAN method worked except for guest VMs on the host with bonded ports. I was getting alot of packet loss. It could maybe be fixed with more complex VLAN setup but I got the LAG settings to work.

Setting the Netgear switch to LACP LAGs and using balance-rr mode, it works as desired. The switch thinks the LACP LAG is down because the PC is not configured for 802.3 bonding mode, but I'm happy with this solution for now.

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