Re: Bonded gigabit cards

[Kurt Keville <kkeville@MIT.EDU>]

When you get every second (or third if you have 3 switches in your bonded 
network) packet in a comingling of bonded and non-bonded NICs, your message 
will "eventually" get through but that somewhat detracts from the point of 
channel bonding since the other cards would incur the same overhead.

*snip*

> *snip*
>
> > Channel bonding is transparent to practically all network protocols,
> > but channel bonding does *not* interoperate with non-channel-bonded
> > networking.  (The non-channel bonded machines will not receive every
> > second packet.)  One consequence is that network booting does not work
> > (DHCP, BOOTP, Etherboot, PXE, whatever).  This can be an
> > inconvenience.  For example, we use FAI to automatically install
> > nodes, but if for example we have a disk failure on a node, we have to
> > schedule a cluster shutdown to switch to non-channel-bonded to
> > reinstall the node.