.Dd 2004-04-09

.Dt IFENSLAVE 8

.\" Manual page created by Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org>

.Sh NAME

.Nm ifenslave

.Nd Attach and detach slave network devices to a bonding device.

.Sh SYNOPSIS

.Nm

.Op Fl acdfhuvV

.Op Fl -all-interfaces

.Op Fl -change-active

.Op Fl -detach

.Op Fl -force

.Op Fl -help

.Op Fl -usage

.Op Fl -verbose

.Op Fl -version

.Ar master

.Ar slave

.No ...

.Sh DESCRIPTION

.Nm

is a tool to attach and detach slave network devices to a bonding device.

A bonding device will act like a normal Ethernet network device to the kernel,

but will send out the packets via the slave devices using a simple round-robin scheduler.

This allows for simple load-balancing,

identical to "channel bonding" or "trunking" techniques used in switches.

.Pp

The kernel must have support for bonding devices for

.Nm

to be useful.

.Sh OPTIONS

.Bl -tag -width indent

.It Fl a, -all-interfaces

Show information about all interfaces.

.It Fl c, -change-active

Change active slave.

.It Fl d, -detach

Removes slave interfaces from the bonding device.

.It Fl f, -force

Force actions to be taken if one of the specified interfaces appears not to belong to an Ethernet device.

.It Fl h, -help

Display a help message and exit.

.It Fl u, -usage

Show usage information and exit.

.It Fl v, -verbose

Print warning and debug messages.

.It Fl V, -version

Show version information and exit.

.El

If not options are given, the default action will be to enslave interfaces.

.Sh EXAMPLE

The following example shows how to setup a bonding device and

enslave two real Ethernet devices to it:

.Bd -literal

# modprobe bonding

# ifconfig bond0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.0.0

# ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1

.Ed

.Sh AUTHOR

.Nm

was originally written by

.An Donald Becker Aq becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov ,

and has since been updated by various kernel developers.

.Pp

This manual page was written by

.An Guus Sliepen Aq guus@debian.org

for the Debian GNU/Linux system.