General Information - MikroTik RouterOS v2.9 Reference Manual

determenation relies on the device driver. If bonding shows that the link status is up, when it
should not be, then it means that this card don't support this possibility.
• mii-type2 - uses MII type2 to determine link status (used if mii-type1 is not supported by the
NIC)
• none - no method for link monitoring is used. If a link fails, it is not considered as down (but no
traffic passes through it, thus).
mac-address ( read-only: MAC address ) - MAC address of the bonding interface
mii-interval ( time ; default: 00:00:00.100 ) - how often to monitor the link for failures (parameter
used only if link-monitoring is mii-type1 or mii-type2)
mtu ( integer : 68 ..1500 ; default: 1500 ) - Maximum Transmit Unit in bytes
mode ( 802.3ad | active-backup | balance-alb | balance-rr | balance-tlb | balance-xor | broadcast ;
default: balance-rr ) - interface bonding mode. Can be one of:
• 802.3ad - IEEE 802.3ad dynamic link aggregation. In this mode, the interfaces are aggregated
in a group where each slave shares the same speed. If you use a switch between 2 bonding
routers, be sure that this switch supports IEEE 802.3ad standard. Provides fault tolerance and
load balancing.
• active-backup - provides link backup. Only one slave can be active at a time. Another slave
becomes active only, if first one fails.
• balance-alb - adaptive load balancing. It includes balance-tlb and received traffic is also
balanced. Device driver should support for setting the mac address, then it is active. Otherwise
balance-alb doesn't work. No special switch is required.
• balance-rr - round-robin load balancing. Slaves in bonding interface will transmit and receive
data in sequential order. Provides load balancing and fault tolerance.
• balance-tlb - Outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load on each slave.
Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If receiving slave fails, then another slave
takes the MAC address of the failed slave. Doesn't require any special switch support.
• balance-xor - Use XOR policy for transmit. Provides only failover (in very good quality), but
not load balancing, yet.
• broadcast - Broadcasts the same data on all interfaces at once. This provides fault tolerance but
slows down traffic throughput on some slow machines.
name ( name ) - descriptive name of bonding interface
primary ( name ; default: none ) - Interface is used as primary output media. If primary interface
fails, only then others slaves will be used. This value works only with mode=active-backup
slaves ( name ) - at least two ethernet-like interfaces separated by a comma, which will be used for
bonding
up-delay ( time ; default: 00:00:00 ) - if a link has been brought up, bonding interface is disabled
for up-delay time and after this time it is enabled. Value should be a multiple of mii-interval
Notes
Link failure detection and failover is working significantly better with expensive network cards, for
example, made by Intel, then with more cheap ones. For example, on Intel cards failover is taking
place in less than a second after link loss, while on some other cards, it may require up to 20
seconds. Also, the Active load balancing (mode=balance-alb) does not work on some cheap cards.
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