[CentOS] CentOS 5.7 Ethernet bonding - order of enslavement matters?

[whitivery]

whitivery <co55-sy1t at dea.spamcon.org> wrote:

>Setting up bonding in active-backup mode 1 (using ARP monitoring)
>on a server, it looked OK, but pulling the active link cable
>didn't actually work, it didn't fail over.
>
>Eventually with manual playing around with modprobe, ifconfig,
>ifenslave, etc., a solution was stumbled upon: enslave the eth1
>device before eth0, and all is good.
>
>Why this should matter is a puzzle - I could not find anything in
>bonding.txt or on the web about it.
>
>I had to change ifup-eth to fix the problem.
>
>Any ideas on why the enslavement order matters, or a better
>solution to work around it?
>
>The rest of this post is details.
>
>
>To fix this, I had to patch
>/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth to reverse the order when
>it is updating the sysfs slaves list.  A 1-line change, from:
>
>for device in $(LANG=C egrep -l "^[[:space:]]*MASTER=\"?${DEVICE}\"?"
>/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) ; do
>
>to:
>
>for device in $(LANG=C egrep -l "^[[:space:]]*MASTER=\"?${DEVICE}\"?"
>/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* | sort -r) ; do
>
>
>With that change, everything works perfectly.
>
>I don't like this solution (changing standard system files) but
>it seems like the best one for now, and should not break
>anything.
>
>
>Maybe it's the particular network devices.  Platform is VIA M850
>running CentOS5.7 64-bit, original content from DVD (no yum
>update done).
>
>Eth0 is the onboard device, using an updated VIA Velocity driver
>(velocityget 1.42 instead of default via-velocity):
>
>05:00.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6120/VT6121/VT6122
>Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 82)
>
>Eth1 is a Linksys (Cisco) USB300M USB-Ethernet dongle, using asix
>driver:
>
>Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0b95:7720 ASIX Electronics Corp. AX88772
>
>Modprobe.conf:
>
>alias eth0 velocityget
>
>With the network service enabled (NetworkManager disabled), this
>is my setup:
>
>ifcfg-bond0:
>
>DEVICE=bond0
>BOOTPROTO=none
>ONBOOT=yes
>IPADDR=10.6.0.90
>NETMASK=255.255.255.0
>GATEWAY=10.6.0.1
>BONDING_OPTS="mode=active-backup arp_interval=300 primary=eth0
>arp_ip_target=+10.6.0.1 arp_ip_target=+10.6.0.2"
>
>ifcfg-eth0:
>
>DEVICE=eth0
>BOOTPROTO=none
>ONBOOT=yes
>IPADDR=10.6.0.90
>NETMASK=255.255.255.0
>GATEWAY=10.6.0.1
>HWADDR=00:1F:F2:03:FA:45
>MASTER=bond0
>SLAVE=yes
>
>ifcfg-eth1:
>
>DEVICE=eth1
>BOOTPROTO=none
>ONBOOT=yes
>IPADDR=10.6.1.90
>NETMASK=255.255.255.0
>GATEWAY=10.6.0.1
>MASTER=bond0
>SLAVE=yes
>HWADDR=58:6d:8f:3d:8d:4f

Is there a better group to post this to?