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Date:      Sat, 25 Apr 1998 12:13:57 -0700
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        Hans Huebner <hans@artcom.de>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD HA configuration / Ethernet address takeover 
Message-ID:  <199804251913.MAA00572@antipodes.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 25 Apr 1998 15:11:21 %2B0200." <Pine.BSF.3.96.980425145610.11665A-100000@transrapid.artcom.de> 

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> 
> Looking at the ifconfig manpage, I could not find a general way to set a
> Ethernet card's MAC address.  Is there a documented solution to this
> problem?  If not, would adding such functionality be problematic?

Many network adapters sold into the PC market do not allow the MAC 
address to be changed from the factory-assigned value.  Because of 
this, FreeBSD does not offer the facility to change the address (as it 
wouldn't be a general solution).

In your case, if you know the adapter(s) you're using, you could add 
code to allow the change to be made.  This would involve implementing 
the SIOCGIFHWADDR and SIOCSIFHWADDR (get/set hardware address) socket
ioctls, which would be relatively simple.

You could also obtain such work from a FreeBSD consultant for a very 
reasonable sum, if you were willing to supply one of each of the 
adapters you intended to use.

> Any pointers, hints or suggestions are greatly appreciated.  I'd also be
> interested in any reports on running two FreeBSD systems on one shared
> SCSI bus.  I suppose the disk driver would need to be changed quite a bit
> to make use of the RESERVE UNIT SCSI command to prevent access collisions.

None of the filesystems supported by FreeBSD are suited to multiple
consumers, so I'm not sure what you would hope to gain from such a
thing.  If your intention was to be able to swap the disk set to the
replacement server, you'd be better off with a SCSI switch.  FreeBSD
systems don't tend to take very long to come up when suitably configured,
so you could well just shut the primary server down, flip the SCSI 
switch and then hit enter at the boot: prompt on your warm spare.

As others have suggested, though, all of the services that you've 
described already support redundant servers.

-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com



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