From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Sep 8 0:24:10 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from jason.argos.org (a1-3a123.neo.rr.com [24.93.180.123]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1790914BEA for ; Wed, 8 Sep 1999 00:24:02 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@argos.org) Received: from localhost (mike@localhost) by jason.argos.org (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id DAA26648; Wed, 8 Sep 1999 03:23:25 -0400 Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 03:23:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Nowlin To: Andrzej Bialecki Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: High Availability (Re: MAC takeover ) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Another issue: I was recently involved in a project which required HA > solutions (that's why I asked]. I gathered a lot of ideas and materials > (and perhaps some code if that company agrees to release it). Is ther > someone else here who is interested in these issues, and using FreeBSD for > that? We could start some info pages, howto's, and perhaps a mailing > list... Definitely... I use FreeBSD for critical medical applications (no life support equipment, though.. :) ) Although the main DB server is running on an Alpha under DEC Unix (for legal reasons, not by choice), the rest of the network is "powered by FreeBSD". Failures are rare, but when they happen, my pager goes off immediately, and I get to drop whatever I'm doing and head off to work. HA capabilities like this would really help out -- most of the software running is duplicated between machines so one box can take over another's workload if necessary, but it's a manual job doing all the switching... (IP aliasing, NATD/IPFW changes, etc. just to move DNS and printing to another box, for example.) Although our switching equipment has an "understanding" of path redundancy and other HA techniques, most of the other boxes don't... I suppose the first thing I'd make use of would be the ability to drop two ethernet cards (fxp, probably) into each machine -- if one of them croaks ("network cable yanked -- you mean I can't plug a phone into this jack???" is the most frequent problem), the other one would be brought online automatically -- preferrably with the same ethernet address to avoid confusing the rest of the network. --mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message