Hi
Thanks for all the replies.

I am afraid that the issue is not portfast. It was set before I did the
test and and I set it again this morning just to be sure. I am at a bit
of a lost as to what to try next. The bonding driver in RHEL5 is more
than a year old so it might be a bug...

Regards

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rhelv5-list-bounces@(protected)-
> bounces@(protected)
> Sent: 01 April 2008 18:01
> To: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) discussion mailing-list
> Subject: Re: [rhelv5-list] bonding problems
>
> On Tue, 01 Apr 2008, Gerrard Geldenhuis wrote:
>
> > eth0 is plugged into a Cisco 2950 called A
> > eth2 is plugged into a separate Cisco 2950 called B
> <snip>
> > Watching /proc/net/bonding/bond0 this shows that it immediately
makes
> > eth0 active again.
> >
> > However immediately upon doing that the ping starts to fail for
about 30
> > seconds and then after 30 seconds starts working again.
>
> This sounds like a spanning tree issue. To test this you can turn on
> portfast
> on the switch by running 'spanning-tree portfast' on the interfaces
> that the HP is connected to. My rudimentary understanding of spanning
tree
> is that it is an inter-switch protocol that provides path negotiation
and
> protects against things like network loops. The default setting is to
> prevent packets from being transmitted over the port while the
spanning
> tree negotiation takes place. Setting portfast tells the switch to
> transmit packets while the negotiation is happening. Be sure to talk
to a
> network admin before using something like this on a wide scale.
>
> One of the general problems with using the Link Detection method of
> bonding is that it assumes that the interface is active as long as
there
> is a link. Things like spanning tree can make this assumption invalid.
If
> you don't mind the additional traffic on your network, you might want
to
> look into the arp_interval and arp_ip_target bonding module options.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Doug

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