carping about CARP

Fri Nov 30 14:35:10 UTC 2012

Henning Brauer <hb-nanog at bsws.de> writes:

> * Robert E. Seastrom <rs at seastrom.com> [2012-11-30 13:46]:
>> My problem is not with Theo nor with the IETF.  My problem is with a
>> crappy and credulous implementation.  When an outage is caused by
>> redundancy software that comes from an organization that prides itself
>> on well-written code, the irony meter goes off the scale.
>
> vrrp and carp share the vhid space. you have to use unique vhids per
> network segment, that's about it.
>
> the openbsd box was nice enough to tell you about the mac address
> conflict, the other's didn't.

pfSense is FreeBSD, but who's counting?  The problem is magnified when
ill-behaved software ends up in appliances.  Good thing we were able
to get a shell on the box.

> if you looked at the carp boxes you had seen that carp had continued
> to work just fine. the mac address (which is basically "fixed prefix +
> vhid) conflict is your "outage". there's nothing we could do about
> that.
>
> and re IANA, they made it clear they would not give us a proto number
> no matter what; we didn't have a choice but to ignore that
> industry-money-driven committee.

Between choosing an Ethernet OUI which was assigned to IANA by IEEE
(another "industry-money-driven committee") and choosing protocol 112
(odds of coincidence 1 in what, 120 or so at the time?), "ignore" is
not the word I would have chosen here.

-r