I was wanting to setup my server with bonded network interface cards (NICs). Since it took me a while to get the bond working, I thought I do some notes to self here; added benefit of sharing with you all.

Configuration

This is my /etc/network/interfaces file:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug enp11s0f0
  iface enp11s0f0 inet manual
  bond-master bond0

allow-hotplug enp11s0f1
  iface enp11s0f1 inet manual
  pre-up sleep 5 # Come up 5 seconds after enp11s0f0
  bond-master bond0

allow-hotplug enp3s0
  iface enp3s0 inet manual
  pre-up sleep 5 # Come up 5 seconds after enp11s0f0
  bond-master bond0

allow-hotplug enp2s0
  iface enp2s0 inet manual
  pre-up sleep 5 # Come up 5 seconds after enp11s0f0
  bond-master bond0

# The bonded interface
allow-hotplug bond0
  iface bond0 inet dhcp
  bond-primary enp11s0f0
  bond-slaves enp11s0f0 enp11s0f1 enp3s0 enp2s0
  bond-mode 6 # balance-alb
  bond-miimon 100
  bond-downdelay 200
  bond-updelay 200
  bond-lacp-rate 1

You’ll notice that my NICs aren’t eth0, eth1, eth2, and eth3. Nope, that would be way too easy. In order to get the names of my NICs, I used: ip link show.

Decisions

I chose to use allow-hotplug on the NICs instead of auto. While booting with auto set, I was getting a significant delay: a start job is running for raise network interfaces (5 mins 1 sec). This is because auto causes the system to wait for DHCP relay, even if it’s set to manual.

Additionally, I chose to have my main NIC boot instantly while the other three NICs would wait five seconds (pre-up sleep 5). This is one method of ensuring that my main NIC was the one that the bond spoofed the mac address of. Another method would have been to specify the hwaddress in the bond; such as:

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet manual
hwaddress fe:80:12:04:6d:6f

I hope this helps others out there in the ether!