ARP monitoring on multiple bonded interfaces in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 can erroneously think network is unavailable.

Issue

If using ARP monitoring and more than one bonded network interface exists, the settings may not be respected if using /etc/modprobe.conf.

/etc/modprobe.conf "options" are applied to all bonded interfaces. The second bonded interface would try to ARP against the IP of the first one and would result in the 2nd interface thinking the network is unavailable. The common situation is in a clustered environment where separate private and public networks exist.