Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 03:23:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Nowlin <mike@argos.org> To: Andrzej Bialecki <abial@webgiro.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: High Availability (Re: MAC takeover ) Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.05.9909080303370.26407-100000@jason.argos.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9909080849310.9479-100000@freja.webgiro.com>
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> 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
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