QQ on how to configure Bonding NIC (balance-tlb (5))

[rcmpayne]

So i have two nics now, connected to a switch. Each nic has static IP set (192.168.0.100 and 101). I go to each nic and change the Bonding to Yes and set both to balance-tlb (5) correct? doesn't look quite right.

[John_M]

Your current configuration has two bonds (bond0 and bond1), each with a single member. You want a single bond with two members. Turn off bonding and bridging on eth1, then add eth1 to the list of bonding members of bond0 (currently only eth0). The list should look like: eth0, eth1 with a comma and space separating them.

 

Unless absolutely everything on your LAN has Jumbo frames enabled and you thoroughly understand the implications, set the MTU to 1500 or you'll have problems. Jumbo frames are not backwards compatible and are, frankly, more trouble than they are worth.

[pwm]

Jumbo packets was very important with old NIC that issued one interrupt for every received or transmitted packet.

 

A decent NIC should have send and receive queues and be able to do interrupt coalescing so the OS can handle many packets at every interrupt giving basically the same performance without the jumbo frame incompatibility. It's mostly the switches that gets a larger number of packets/second that they need to switch - but they have custom hardware for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt_coalescing

 

[rcmpayne]

7 hours ago, John_M said:

Your current configuration has two bonds (bond0 and bond1), each with a single member. You want a single bond with two members. Turn off bonding and bridging on eth1, then add eth1 to the list of bonding members of bond0 (currently only eth0). The list should look like: eth0, eth1 with a comma and space separating them.

 

Unless absolutely everything on your LAN has Jumbo frames enabled and you thoroughly understand the implications, set the MTU to 1500 or you'll have problems. Jumbo frames are not backwards compatible and are, frankly, more trouble than they are worth.

 

Ok i have a HP proliant 160 G6 with dual nics in it and i have my mtu at 9k to match the PC's, router, switches on my network. i think i have it all set up correctly. 

 

Is this a better approach vs assigning the second nic to Plex or sab docker? 

[John_M]

It depends on what you want to achieve. If you dedicate one port to unRAID management and file sharing and the other to dockers you won't have the resilience and load balancing that bonding can give.