I have a bonding configured in few RHEL servers with the following settings. However, I notice that the Bonding_OPTS are not effective. When we pull a cable or the poer off the switch that a NIC port(that is in Bond)is conencted, we experience the "Request Timed out" with the below mentioned settings.

A bonding's primary setting in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 is not effective.

BONDING_OPTS parameters are as follows:

grep BONDING_OPTS /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

BONDING_OPTS="mode=1 miimon=50 updelay=50 downdelay=50 primary=eth0"

cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.6.0 (September 26, 2009)

Bonding Mode: fault-tolerance (active-backup)
Primary Slave: eth0 (primary_reselect always)
Currently Active Slave: eth0
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 50
Up Delay (ms): 50
Down Delay (ms): 50

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Speed: 100 Mbps
Duplex: full
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: ac:16:2d:a7:a0:a8
Slave queue ID: 0

Slave Interface: eth1
MII Status: up
Speed: 100 Mbps
Duplex: full
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: ac:16:2d:a7:a0:a9
Slave queue ID: 0

Slave Interface: eth2
MII Status: down
Speed: Unknown
Duplex: Unknown
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: ac:16:2d:a7:a0:aa
Slave queue ID: 0

Slave Interface: eth3
MII Status: down
Speed: Unknown
Duplex: Unknown
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: ac:16:2d:a7:a0:ab
Slave queue ID: 0

I searched the RHEL knowledgebase for resolutions and found some documents saying the following:

Updating to kernel version 2.6.18-164.6.1 or later version or newer resolves this issue. If you use kernel-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5 or older, you need to set the bonding option in /etc/modprobe.conf:

options bonding mode=1 miimon=100 primary=eth0

However, I checked the my kernel status and found that we are running Linux PMC-HR 2.6.32-431.5.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 10 14:46:43 EST 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux.

I still added the entry as mentioned by RHEL for older version of the kernel and rebooted the server. Still the when a network cable is pulled from eth0 or eth1, the card does not detect the failure even though the link light is off.

We would greatly appreciate your assistance and expert advise on this issue that we are encountering.

I also attach the configuration files that I use for your review.

Regards
Jo