From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 29 05:00:19 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA09652 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Wed, 29 Apr 1998 05:00:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from uk.ns.eu.org ([194.117.157.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id FAA09644 for ; Wed, 29 Apr 1998 05:00:12 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from aledm@uk.ns.eu.org) Received: (from aledm@localhost) by uk.ns.eu.org (8.6.12/8.6.12) id MAA01754; Wed, 29 Apr 1998 12:58:52 +0100 Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1998 12:58:52 +0100 (BST) From: Aled Morris X-Sender: aledm@uk.ns.eu.org To: Greg Lehey cc: Hans Huebner , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD HA configuration / Ethernet address takeover In-Reply-To: <19980429111546.54200@papillon.lemis.com> 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 On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Greg Lehey wrote: > Tandem's Reliable Ethernet product does pretty much what you > suggest: it has one board waiting as a hot standby, and if the > first fails, the second will take its MAC address and carry on as > if nothing had happened. The main concern is determining when the > first board has failed. Just to illustrate another approach - Cisco's Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) allows two (or more) routers on the same LAN to share an IP address which you can configure into your LAN hosts as their default route. This address is distinct from the actual address of your routers, so the HSRP address is basically a secondary (alias) address. The HSRP address also has its own MAC address, so if a fail-over occurs, the new "active" router simply starts responding to the HSRP MAC and IP address. This avoids problems with ARP cache flushing. The protocol is implemented by broadcasting keep-alives every 10 seconds or so on the LAN, and there are tweaks for nominating preferred routers, simple security etc. It would be cool to support this in FreeBSD (of course) but I don't know if the HSRP protocol is published. Aled -- tel +44 973 207987 O- aledm@routers.co.uk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message