Is Your Bond Strong?

Most critical physical systems use multiple network interfaces bonded together to provide redundancy and, depending on the workload, to provide greater network throughput. Bonding can be configured in either manner depending on the mode specified in the bonding configuration file. It is quite common to misconfigure bonding. It is case sensitive so something might be capitalized that shouldn’t be. You might have misunderstood the documentation and configured an incorrect or suboptimal bonding mode. The Red Hat Insights team has identified a number of misconfigurations that can leave your system without the redundancy you expect, or that will degrade the network performance when you most need it. We have bundled all of these rules into one Network Bonding topic so that you can easily know whether Insights has detected an issue and, if so, what steps you should take to remediate it. We’ll keep adding rules to the topic as we discover new issues related to network bonding.

Here is the list of rules initially included in the Network Bonding topic:

• Decreased network performance when GRO is not enabled on all parts of bonded interfaces
• Verify EtherChannel configuration
• Upgrade initscripts package
• Bonding might activate incorrect interface
• Bonding negotiation issue
• VLAN tagging failover issue on bonded interface
• Unexpected behavior with bad syntax in bond config
• Decreased network performance when not using a correct LACP hash in networking bonding
• Monitoring disabled for network bond
• Failure to generate a vmcore over the network when missing bonding option parameter in kdump configuration file