Code|Beta

To some of you this is a task that is done everyday, to others this is something that is done sometimes and some might think that this is something from hell. I actually like doing this task, well not at a corporate level, at least for now.

At home I have a small network, this is what I have done so far.

Amongst my servers, I have a file server running on Ubuntu Server 6.10. This is mostly a headless server that has less than 500GB of storage in two hard drives and uses Samba to share the files with the Windows workstations. I was having a bit of an issue with this server where if I streamed music and tried to move big files, these often being around 700MB, the server would begin to have trouble streaming or moving the files and it would slow down the moving of the files.

So, I had an idea, this server has two NICs and both are RealTek so how hard could it be to set up network bonding. As it turns out it’s harder than you think, well it is if you don’t have the right information, but then again what is easy when you don’t have the right information.

After multiple HowTos and articles and postings in forums a friend from NYLUG gave me a link to HowToForge that spoke about doing this. So I followed the HowTo and boom in a matter of minutes I had the whole thing working in Mode 0, well I actually ran into a little glitch in the process and had to reboot the server. As it turns out the two cards have RealTek chipset but use different kernel modules to run, one uses the 8139cp and the other one uses 8139too, now don’t ask me why this is this way because I didn’t set this up this way, Ubuntu configured it like that. Now before you start flaming me because of this let me explain why I’m using Ubuntu in the first place, Ubuntu is easy and quick to install on an x86 machine and I needed this machine to be up and running as fast as possible.

So, moving along, I thought at first that both cards used the same kernel modules, therefore I configured the whole system to run using the 8139too modules for both NICs and this cause the system to hang and loose all network communication. After rebooting I checked out the dmesg output and found out that this was not the case, so I reconfigured everything and it came back up nicely. But it wasn’t able to get an address through DHCP, so I was like WTF?!?!, I actually used the same MAC Address that the eth0 NIC has in order to not have to reconfigure the firewall as well, so I set the IP address manually and it worked then I did a dhpclient3 and it obtained the IP through DHCP and it has Internet connection, now I have a doubt, when I have to eventually reboot the server, will it obtain the IP over DHCP or will I have to manually go through the process? I guess I will leave it in doubt for now and test it later.

Other plans that are on the way: Getting a VPN working on a Windows 2003 Server. I actually tried this using OpenVPN but it tended to be a hassle to get it installed on Windows XP Home and specially since I would need to have someone who is non-technical set it up in their laptop, so that wouldn’t be a plan that is easy to implement.

Happy Networking

-LM