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My goal is to create a redundant internet connection. I have a USB-LTE Modem and a wired connection. I work on ubuntu 16.04. I can use both on their own but I want to combine them together to create redundancy. Now I searched for solutions and found the kernel bonding module.

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt?v=3.13

I tried multiple configurations. The mode I want to get working is the active backup mode as this is the mode which would give me redundancy. What I achieved: I can add both interfaces to bond0 and ping though that interface (tested with ping and route). The output from /proc/net/bonding/bond0 also looks fine for me:

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.7.1 (April 27, 2011)

Bonding Mode: fault-tolerance (active-backup)
Primary Slave: usb0 (primary_reselect always)
Currently Active Slave: usb0
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
Up Delay (ms): 200
Down Delay (ms): 200

Slave Interface: usb0
MII Status: up
Speed: Unknown
Duplex: Unknown
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 02:1e:10:1f:00:00
Slave queue ID: 0

Slave Interface: enx00044b580af6
MII Status: up
Speed: 1000 Mbps
Duplex: full
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:04:4b:58:0a:f6
Slave queue ID: 0

However, if I test the worst case and remove the USB-LTE Modem the connection is lost completely (can't even ping anymore). So no redundancy at all.

My guess is that I have a dhcp/gateway problem here. Because the both slaves interfaces have a complete different ISP etc. Sadly, I don't have a lot of experience with networking on linux and can't solve it on my own.

So my Question: Is it possible to bond two such different connections together with the bonding module? And if yes, any ideas how?

Jeff Schaller
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razac
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    Bonding is for failure of layer two (e.g., Ethernet) links, not layer three (IP) links. I really doubt you can get this to work with bonding—you need to do it with IP routing. I know we have a few questions on doing that... going to try to dig one up to leave some pointers. – derobert May 04 '17 at 16:33
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    Here is one I answered before: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/70440/routing-for-multiple-uplinks-providers/71834#71834 – derobert May 04 '17 at 16:42
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    Also: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/87990/linux-as-router-with-multiple-internet-providers – derobert May 04 '17 at 16:59
  • @derobert Thank you for your answers,I had not thought about this. I will lookup your answers and make tests again. As soon as any progress happens I will come back to this thread. – razac May 04 '17 at 19:11

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