@johnpoz

That is what I intended to say I am just dyslexic when it comes to VLANs.

@SteveITS Thank you for this. I expected to see something similar with my primary's NICs. I did however set up CARP a number of times with the UI in 2.7.2, which may have triggered the problem in my case.

I have bi-directional pfsync set up, but XMLRPC sync is only from the primary to the secondary.

I will report the issue to the developers.

@CaptainKeyboard
The hint to consider rule was in my first post.

But glad, that's working now.

@viragomann thank you!

So I edited config.xml (plus 63 IP Aliases) and held my breath...

The web interface of the secondary firewall became unresponsive for several minutes (the command line was still available). During this time, the secondary sent dozens of messages about assuming CARP state whatsoever.

Eventually, things settled down and I could access the web interface again. I found that both firewalls considered themselves master for the "interface" CARP IP and all Alias IPs associated with it.

I temporarily disabled CARP on both firewalls and enabled it again. Now things look okay.

@nxsysop Hi, i know this is an old post, but wondering if your solution worked. We are also trying to setup using a pair of 8200's. We are going to use LACP, but wasn't sure if static or dynamic would work with the Dell switches which are setup using VLT. Thanks

I didn't find a solution until now to have HA with IGMP Proxy.

Has somebody a solution which works fine?

i have replicated topology in GNS3 Lab and have same issue:

Immagine 2024-03-27 172830.jpg

@kprovost I have now got this working, I have no idea what I did differently but on two newly built virtual machines I have it working.

It’s generally recommended to avoid using the Virtual IP (VIP) to access the GUI for security reasons. The VIP is typically exposed to more traffic and potential attacks, so accessing the GUI through it could expose sensitive administrative interfaces. Instead, it’s safer to access the GUI from a management interface or VPN that’s not directly exposed to the internet. When you route all traffic from the Test subnet through the pfSense firewall using a specific LAN IP, you’re essentially creating a single point of failure. If you want to use the VIP (10.0.2.101) and still have the traffic appear to come from the load balancer’s public IP, you’ll need to ensure that the VIP is correctly configured for outbound NAT and that the load balancer is set up to handle outbound traffic from the VIP address.

Are you using pfSense CE or Plus? I think that is my first follow up question, Plus is supposed to have some more "stuff" in it to help with IPsec failover delays, as mentioned in the docs.

It's been a while since I've had to failover a node for testing so I could be remembering wrong but I think it was near instant failover. But the docs do mention it could take until the timeout of the tunnel if the peer is the one initiating.

Do you have dead peer detection enabled and do you know if the other side of the tunnel does? That should in theory cause the peer to initiate the tunnel again quickly.

Also, as far as I can tell, the backup node in the HA cluster should become an initiator when it's status changes to Master; I'm sure it is, but can you confirm (when in failover) that the primary says Backup and the secondary says Master? Just to be 100% sure that is working.

Finally, from what I am seeing, I think it should work just as well without XLMRPC so that's the good news.

@viragomann

I watched all of netgate official tutorials.
In one of them they mention that if my setup is structured as a DMZ, the outbound NAT should be set as default:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UszV8qIaRw&t=2426s

My setup is set as a DMZ
COMCAST ROUTER -> DMZ WAN CARP IP (either pfsense1 or pfsense2)

I removed the custom NAT outbound rules pointing to the WAN CARP IP, and left it at hybrid default rules.
The DNS resolution is working now.

Besides this small mention in a tutorial from 9 years ago, I do not see anywhere else this mention about DMZ in the documentation from netgate. Either way, it is working now. I hope this helps someone else in the future.

Thank you for your help!

I checked the primary and secondary pfsense again last night. The dhcpd were on on both. I guess that is probably the intended behaviour. I see the failover dhcpd in the dhcp status page. I think I am all good. Thanks.

@reberhar Hi All

The answer was already in the forum.

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/182996/openvpn-with-ha-carp-not-connecting-on-vip

Thanks for your patience.

Roy

Ok, so scrambling round for an unused switc, i have discovered the Proxmox on its own wont do layer 2 switching.. once i plugged the 2 vPFsense into a switch they started behaving as expexted....

All the CARP HA responded as primary & backup acordingly and failover works like a charm.

@viragomann That's great, thanks for your reply. I'll be validating this forthcoming but it gives me confidence hearing it from someone else. Much appreciated.

@Yathus
We are also running two pfSense in HA mode on ESXi7. But we have no issues like this.

A view day ago the hosts were taken down for maintenance and started up again, one by the other. The master moved over to the secondary with all services, IPSec, OpenVPN, HAproxy, and back again flawlessly.

However, we don't move around the VMs from one host to another.