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Date:      Tue, 23 Mar 1999 15:03:39 -0800
From:      Mike Thompson <miket@dnai.com>
To:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject:   IP alias configuration for high availability
Message-ID:  <4.1.19990323134009.0099fe10@mail.dnai.com>

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Hello everyone, I'm looking for comments on the following
proposed scheme for managing IP addresses between various 
servers for high availability.

I am attempting to come up with network configuration where 
our web servers running FreeBSD 2.2.8 will respond to two 
different IP addresses on the same network interface.

The idea is that first network address for a server would be 
fixed on the reserved IP addresses of 192.168.xxx.xxx (behind 
a router to prevent packet leakage onto the Internet).  These 
fixed addresses would be used for private communication 
between the various servers.

The other addresses used by each server would be from the 
Internet IP address block assigned from our ISP (example 
209.185.152.1 thru 209.185.152.20).  The Internet IP addresses 
would be round-robin load balanced from our DNS server.  Under 
centralized control any server could be commanded to alias 
an IP address from this block. 

With such a configuration we hope to be able to hot swap 
servers among the various Internet IP addresses for system 
maintenance and emergency situations for high availability.  

To configure the fixed and dynamic addresses for a server I
can use the following commands:

ifconfig ed0 inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig ed0 inet 209.185.152.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias

To dynamically add another Internet IP address to the server 
I can then issue the command:

ifconfig ed0 inet 209.185.152.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias

To dynamically remove the IP address to the server I can 
issue the command:

ifconfig ed0 inet 209.185.152.2 delete

From my testing it seems everything works pretty well.  I have
found that I need to manually break the association between
an IP address and ethernet address on the servers by using the
"arp" utility.

Are there other issues that I should be aware of by following
such a strategy?

Thanks,

Mike Thompson





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