[DRBD-user] DRBD with NIC bonding and Crossover cables - no switch

Matt Ball, IT Hardware Manager mball at wepanow.com
Fri Sep 24 23:51:18 CEST 2010

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


  I have setup NIC bonding with DRBD successfully but we need to try to 
reduce the amount of switch ports required as we need to remotely deploy 
several clusters. We have 2 bonded nics, total of 4 NICs/cables plus one 
for iLo. So we have 6 that must go into the switch (3 from each cluster) 
but want to avoid having those additional cables for drbd and that bond 
going into the switch.

We decided to try and connect the drbd resources together using that 
bond0 channel but using crossover cables instead of going through the 
switch. No joy. Cannot ping, no communications, destination on trace 
route shows as the 169.* hardware failure address...

We have all GB NICs and the cables are GB crossover.

We have tried mode-1, mode-5, and mode-6 which all claim to work without 
needing special switch configurations.

Is there any way to connect a bonded NIC (trunk) and have drbd 
communicate through it?

I apologize in advance if this is not appropriate for the drbd message 
board, I realize it may be outside the scope of this forum. If so please 
disregard.



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