On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 14:26 -0700, Clayton Wheeler wrote: > I have a pair of OpenBSD 3.9 firewalls (using pf and carp) attached > to a network with a Windows server cluster on it. The Windows > cluster > moves a shared IP address between nodes using the MAC address of the > actual cluster node, not a common virtual MAC address like pf uses. > When it does this, it sends out gratuitous ARP requests to indicate > that the cluster IP is now associated with a different MAC address.
This is an absolutely abhorrent case of software design/engineering. Of course, I would not be surprised if there is an even more abhorrent case of software design/engineering (namely, something lower level in Windows itself) that makes this the only feasible method. Microsoft has no excuse, as CARP is available under the same license as the code they used to help build the original Windows TCP/IP stack. Yes, crontab'ing "arp -ad" as Karsten suggested is a good workaround, but I'd hardly call that a long term fix. -- Shawn K. Quinn
