Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 15:11:21 +0200 (MEST) From: Hans Huebner <hans@artcom.de> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD HA configuration / Ethernet address takeover Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980425145610.11665A-100000@transrapid.artcom.de>
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Hello there, we're running some of our critial LAN services (NIS, DNS, mail etc.) on FreeBSD. The systems are quite stable, but from time to time we need to take a system down for maintenance purposes. Also, hardware problems can cause unplanned down times. I'm currently looking for a solution to configure a PC as a warm-standby fallback server for the most important services (NIS and DNS). To make a failover to the fallback server as transparent to the users as possible, it would be best if the fallback system could take over the ethernet address of the failed server. I've seen this work with certain (expensive) Solaris configurations, and I'd like to do something similar with FreeBSD. I tried to implement DNS failover by moving our name service IP address to another machine, but this resulted in severe client problems (most clients fail to renegotiate the MAC adress with ARP within finite time). 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? 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. Thanks, Hans To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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