Nowadays, most desktop mainboards provide more than one gigabit ethernet port. Connecting them both to the same switch causes most Linux distros by default to get a individual IP on each device and route traffic only on the primary device (based on device metric) or round-robin. A single connection always starts at one IP and so all traffic goes through one device, limiting maximum bandwidth to 1 GBit.

Here comes bonding (sometimes called (port) trunking or link aggregation) to play. It connects two ore more ethernet ports to one virtual port with only one MAC and so mostly one IP address. Wheres earlier only two hosts (with the same OS running) or two switches (from the same vendor) could be connected, nowadays there's a standard protocol which makes it easy: LACP which is part of IEEE 802.3ad. Continue reading →