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Page 1 of posts tagged "networking" from February 03, 2017

A Bondmode Band-Aid

In which an ever-ready watch keep standing up the bond when it spontaneously falls down.

WARNING (2017-04-06): I've recently found that something in this setup is corrupting NFS traffic between my machines. I'm going to try to isolate it at some point, but be wary.


I've recently built a personal file server (running Ubuntu 16.04), and elected to try connecting it to my main workstation (a macpro6,1 running macOS Sierra) with a pair of bonded 1Gb/s Ethernet links.

Using the default settings does work, however I don't seem to have any control over how the link is negotiated with LACP. It results in using one of the packet hashing modes that puts entire TCP connections on one link or the other. This seems great for stability, and aggregate throughput, however my use case has be mounting the server via NFS or SMB (which runs via a single connection).

In that case, I'm not getting much benefit out of the bond for my primary use case of setting up the bond at all!

Early on, I discovered that if I set both sides of the bond to be "static", then they would both default into a round-robin style packet distribution. In this mode, I can hit 220-230MB/s while doing file operations!

The problem: macOS spontaneously reverts the bond mode back to LACP.

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