Channel-bonding and dhcp

[Judd Tracy]

On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Jon Tegner wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Is it possible to use dhcp and channel-bonding (the documentation for
> kernel 2.2.18 seems to indicate that fixed ip-numbers should be given
> (in the file ifcfg-bond0))? Or is there some other way to keep the
> (network-) configurations of the slave nodes identical?

No it can't be done (at least not easily).  Basically when you setup you
bond device you usually do not have any network interfaces running, so you
can't use the network to get an address.  Also the way the bond device
works is it sets its ethernet address to the address of the first card
that is enslaved, so if you tried to do a dhcp before you setup the bond
device you would have to get the ethernet address of the first card
instead of the bond device.  It would be nice if the bond device could
just take over the settings of the first card and then enslave it, but it
can't enslave a running interface.

I don't know if they have fixed any of these issues in the 2.4 kernel, but
for 2.2 it would be very difficult.

Judd Tracy
jtracy at ist.ucf.edu