I apologize for this blatantly newbie-ish question, but I'd like to do this "the right way" and not just muck about until it seems to work, and the documentation I have doesn't seem to address this case.
Currently, a Debian Linux box that I am working with has the following /etc/network/interfaces file:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet dhcp
pre-up modprobe bonding mode=active-backup miimon=100 primary=eth0
pre-up ip link set bond0 up
pre-up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth0
pre-up /sbin/ifenslave bond0 eth1
The above works fine, and mostly does what I want — on boot, the box comes up and the two Ethernet jacks are used for failover/redundancy (i.e. the box uses the first jack for communications if it is working, otherwise it uses the second jack).
However, for my purposes I don't want to use IPv4 or DHCP. I'd like the box to come up with bond0 using ONLY the box's IPv6 self-assigned address (i.e. fe80::whatever:it:is) and no other IP addresses (well… loopback is okay). What's the proper way to specify this? Should I change "iface bond0 inet dhcp" to "iface bond0 inet6" ? Remove that line completely? Something else? Ideally I'd like to be able to use the exact same file on multiple boxes without modifying it for each one, btw.
Best Answer
I don't have experience with your particular bonding device, but I tried out the following test in a VM on Debian Lenny with a single NIC (
eth0
). In/etc/network/interfaces
:After bringing up
eth0
, here's what I get from/sbin/ifconfig eth0
:So I have an IPv6 Link-local address (derived from the MAC address), and no IPv4 address. I am able to
ping6
another machine on my local network by its Link-local address, and vice versa, so the interface appears to work.So, to sum up: Try setting the
iface
line for yourbond0
interface to:and add this line to the end of its configuration stanza:
I have no idea whether this is "the right way" to do it, but it works for my simplified case.