HOWTO : Network Interfaces Bonding on Kali Linux 1.0.9a

This guide also works for Kali Linux 1.1.0

If you have two network interface cards, you can bond two interfaces together to increase the bandwidth (aka teaming). I am going to show you how to configure Mode 0 (balance-rr). You can do it on Ubuntu too.

We need to install the driver.

apt-get update
apt-get install ifenslave-2.6

Activate bonding when boot up.

echo "bonding" >> /etc/modules

Load the module now for configuration.

modprobe bonding

Backup the interfaces configure file.

mv /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.orig

Edit the interfaces configure file.

nano /etc/network/interfaces

The content should be looking as the following. Please note that the address, gateway and netmask may be different from yours.



Restart your network :

/etc/init.d/networking restart
or
service networking restart

To confirm the bonding is working by the following commands :

The result of ifconfig will be looking like this.



Then we check the bonding interfaces.



Description of Bonding modes

Mode 0 - balance-rr

Round-robin policy: Transmit packets in sequential order from the first available slave through the last. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

Mode 1 - active-backup

Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond's MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch. This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary option affects the behavior of this mode.

Mode 2 - balance-xor

XOR policy: Transmit based on selectable hashing algorithm. The default policy is a simple source+destination MAC address algorithm. Alternate transmit policies may be selected via the xmit_hash_policy option, described below. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

Mode 3 - broadcast

Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance.

Mode 4 - 802.3ad

IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.

Prerequisites:
Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed and duplex of each slave.
A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Most switches will require some type of configuration to enable 802.3ad mode.

Mode 5 - balance-tlb

Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.

Prerequisites:
Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed of each slave.

Mode 6 - balance-alb

Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the local system on their way out and overwrites the source hardware address with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves in the bond such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the server.

Jeremy Cullen find another way the make bond0 to work on his DELL Poweredge 1950 :



That's all! See you.