channel bonding gigabit ethernet (intel e1000) with redhat 7.1 (kernel 2.4.2)

[Gordon Gere]

I have experienced problem getting channel bonding to work using the intel supplied drivers (the only available drivers that I am aware of) and the current version of the bonding module and ifenslave utility.  It seems to stem from a an inability to set the MAC address of 2nd and 3rd interfaces.

Note: I realize the performance gain is negligable with gigabit cards, but it is required by our setup.  We are trying to connect our main node using gigabit copper to the child nodes which use 100mbit.  They are connected through a 48port 100mbit switch that has a gigabit module installed.  We want to increase our performance by channel bonding, something which has already been tested and provides a good performance increase based on the minimal cost of duplicating the network hardware.  We would prefer not to have to revert from gigabit to 100mbit for the head node.  We also hope this will avoid some bottlenecks where a lot of child nodes are attempting to communicate with the main node.

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
    Gordon Gere
    ROCIT System Admin
    (http://vivaldi.chem.uwo.ca/rocit/)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20020227/86b75808/attachment.html>