With POWER6, the default addresses of the service processors have changed. This only applies to environments where the managed system was powered on before the HMC was configured to act as an DHCP server. The Service Processors may get their IP-Addresses by three different mechanisms:

1. Addresses received from a DHCP Server.
2. Fixed addresses given to the interfaces using the ASMI.
3. Default addresses if neither of the possibilities above is used.

The default addresses are different betweeen POWER5 and POWER6 servers. With POWER5 we have the following addresses:

Port HMC1: 192.168.2.147/24
Port HMC2: 192.168.3.147/24

The POWER6 systems use the following addresses:

First Service Processor:
Port HMC1: 169.254.2.147/24
Port HMC2: 169.254.3.147/24

Second Service Processor:
Port HMC1: 169.254.2.146/24
Port HMC2: 169.254.3.146/24

Link: System p Operations Guide for ASMI and for Nonpartitioned Systems.

Linux allows binding multiple network interfaces into a single channel/NIC using special kernel module called bonding. According to official bonding documentation, The Linux bonding driver provides a method for aggregating multiple network interfaces into a single logical "bonded" interface. The behavior of the bonded interfaces depends upon the mode; generally speaking, modes provide either hot standby or load balancing services. Additionally, link integrity monitoring may be performed.

Setting up bounding is easy with RHEL v4.0. Red Hat Linux stores network configuration in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory. First, you need to create bond0 config file:

# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

Append following lines to it:

DEVICE=bond0
IPADDR=192.168.1.20
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
USERCTL=no
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes

Replace above IP address with your actual IP address. Save file and exit to shell prompt. Now open the configuration files for eth0 and eth1 in the same directory using the vi text editor and make sure file read as follows for eth0 interface:

# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
USERCTL=no
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
BOOTPROTO=none

Repeat the same for the ifcfg-eth1 file, of course, set the DEVICE to eth1. Then, make sure that the following two lines are added to either /etc/modprobe.conf or /etc/modules.conf (see this page or also this page for more information):

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 miimon=100

Then load the bonding module:

# modprobe bonding

Restart networking service in order to bring up bond0 interface:

# service network restart

Verify everything is working:

# less /proc/net/bonding/bond0
Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 0
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:0c:29:c6:be:59

Slave Interface: eth1
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:0c:29:c6:be:63