On the State of High Availability¶

Demand for viable open source solutions for high availability seems to be on the decline – or at least the supply seems to be withering away. I can only speculate why this may be the case. Maybe the requirement for clustering pushes projects to evaluate enterprise solutions, or maybe the demand truely isn’t there.

I recently noticed this all while setting up a fairly simple configuration – I was setting up two boxes to act as SPoF, active-passive gateways. These boxes were going to run FreeBSD and pf for NAT and routing, and I would use CARP or Linux-HA for host failover.

So, my first attempt, FreeBSD 8.2 on both boxes. CARP requires a kernel re-compile. Not above my comfort zone, but in the interest of future maintainability, I opted for FreeBSD 9.0.

FreeBSD 9.0 and CARP didn’t work because of the missing carpdev feature that hasn’t been ported from OpenBSD yet. I required the carpdev feature because the gateway is only allocated 1 public IP, and CARP without carpdev requires 3 addresses per failover address – one IP per physical interface, and the failover address as an alias.

NetBSD does have carpdev, but requires a kernel rebuild. I went ahead anyways, and while the kernel rebuild was clean, ifconfig segfaulted – even after a recompile of ifconfig and netstat.

Back to FreeBSD 9.0, this time without CARP. Alternatives? Freevrrpd: dead. Linux-HA: not fully ported over. So, I tried Linux-HA, specifically heartbeat. All went okay when each interface was brought up with an IP address, but again, this was a problem. My final test was using heartbeat on a down interface, with a heartbeat network on a third interface between the nodes. The failover was okay, but heartbeat refuses to create an interface with anything but a /32 subnet. This shouldn’t be the case, so something feels off.

So, now I am left with only a few options.

Ditch everything and switch to Linux with iptables. Can’t use LVS, it’s dead. I’m stuck with Linux-HA and heartbeat, not to mention iptables – but maybe that’s a slight idelogical stance.

Hack up FreeBSD and heartbeat to get the interface up correctly. Some simple troubleshooting may resolve this issue.

Use FreeBSD and keepalived. This is not fully ported from Linux though.

Switch to OpenBSD, so I can use both pf and carpdev. However, I feel OpenBSD, as well as NetBSD, would not be as maintainable for my employer – a Linux only shop.

I’m also considering a custom solution may very well be faster at this point.

As I ran into more and more dead-ends, I began switching gears a lot quicker, spending less time troubleshooting each iteration. I believe there are work-arounds for these issues, but my point is not that these projects are flawed, but that the overall pool of solutions is so thin and seemingly outdated.

If I can find myself with some time and a good enough solution, I may try to find my own solution to this problem eventually.