Link aggregate “bondmode” spontaneously changes

Question

I've setup a link aggregate of the two ethernet ports on my macpro6,1 (via System Preferences > Network > Manage Virtual Interfaces > New Link Aggregate).

Due to the way my other devices are setup, I need to set the "bondmode" of my device to "static":

$ sudo ifconfig bond0 bondmode static

The problem so far is that, for no reason that I can discern and triggered by nothing I can identify in the logs, the bondmode reverts back to "lacp", and all of my connections drop.

I can trigger this myself via networksetup -createbond xxx to create an extra (broken) bond. So perhaps changes to the network setup in general reset it to LACP?

Is there something I can do to stop whatever process is causing the bondmode to change, or somehow achieve this another way? My end goal is to get some sort of round-robin style pattern for sending packets to spead a single connection across both ethernet cables to my server, as LACP results in all packets from a given connection going through a single link.

Answer 1

I have not found a true solution, but I have created a band-aid at https://github.com/mikeboers/bondwatch.

It watches for the bond to report being up, but inactive, and then simply calls ifconfig $bondname bondmode static to reset it.

I've been using it for nearly the full two weeks since I asked the question, and it has been working great.