Project: NIC Failover
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Project Description: Network card failover support for Linux
License: GPL

NIC Failover allows a user to set up network card failover on Linux. Oracle's Linux team has used this proof of concept code to test Oracle's Real Application Clusters.

hanicd

Hanicd is a script that implements network failover using the basic version of the bonding module as present in linux kernel 2.4.9
For more recent kernels the arp monitoring of the newer bonding module can be used to obtain the same (see below).

Hanicd requirements for Redhat AS 2.1:

  • An ifenslave executable that supports the '-d' option to detach slaves from a bonding device.
  • It requires mtr to be installed. Hanic was tested with the following rpm : mtr-0.44-1.i386.rpm

    Both ifenslave and the mtr rpm can be found in the the support directory of the download section.

  • The hanicd source, ofcourse, which can be found the in download section. You can also browse the source online

Note for e1000 cards

We recommend the use of the e1000_4412k1 module in AS 2.1 for e1000 cards as the e1000 module doesn't work with bonding.

bonding with multipe arp_ip_targets

Oracle's bonding patch allows you to specify more than one ip for the arp_ip_target module option, so that the network status can be monitored against more than a a single reference ip. E.g. in a four node setup, each node could monitor its network status against the three other nodes.

The multiple arp_ip_target patch has been accepted starting from linux kernel 2.4.21-pre3.

For the latest bonding patches you can visit the sourceforge bonding project.