Get 5 CARP VIPs working on Arcom Apollo ICE - $100

martin.beauchamp · Feb 13, 2007, 10:12 PM

Hello pfSense hackers,

This is a non-traditional bounty in the sense that I'm not requesting a feature. It's more along the lines of paying for troubleshooting services.

Here's the situation:

My employer, which is a food cooperative in Brooklyn, NY has purchased 3 identical machines with the intention of creating a CARP cluster. Each machine has two onboard NICs and two dual port cards as described below.

After configuring the VIPs correctly (as confirmed by hoba on the dev team), 3 of the 5 VIPs are non-functional. The non-functional VIPs are on the addon cards. A symptom of the mystery problem is that after the CARP initialization, the carp interfaces have duplicate VHIDs despite being configured with unique VHIDs. (carp0 - VHID 1, carp1 - VHID 2, carp2 - VHID 1, carp3 - VHID 2, carp4 - VHID 3)

To assist troubleshooting, I will pay for shipping 2 of the machines to and from your location. I would encourage prospective bounty hunters to look at the settings and hardware configuration remotely before attempting the bounty. (Mostly to verify for yourself that things should be working as configured.) Of course if you think can do all of the work remotely, that's fine too.

So what I'd like for successful completion of this bounty is the following:

1. Identify the root cause of the problem with the CARP VIPs on this hardware.
2. Fix the root cause of the problem.
OR
3. Submit enough technical information to the appropriate FreeBSD developers so that the problem can be addressed. This may require additional information be provided to FreeBSD devs at a later date. I would expect that you would continue to cooperate with them until the problem is resolved.

If you can fix the problem directly, I'd rather have that! I realize that I could end up paying money for what amounts to a bug report, but at least this problem would eventually get fixed for everyone.

Also, if you are interested in tackling this issue, but the bounty reward is too low, we can try to come to an agreement based on an estimate of the time involved.

The exact hardware involved is:

Arcom Apollo ICE with (2x) Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adapter - http://www.arcom.com/industrial-enclosure-apollo.htm

I'm using pfSense 1.0.1 Embedded on a 1 GB CF card. I have tried the 1/7/2007 and 2/7/2007 SNAPSHOTS which exhibits the same behavior.

Thanks for reading!

Martin

Numbski · Feb 15, 2007, 5:35 PM

Drop me an e-mail. oss-solutions.com, username is tshadwick. I'll get you fixed up. ;)

(or rather, we can discuss. I may have to do it on an hourly basis rather than $100 flat rate, as we usually bill out at $125/hour. If the systems come configured with the problem environment and a network map displaying the issue, we would at least be able to hit the group running to work on it).

martin.beauchamp · Feb 28, 2007, 1:51 AM

Thanks to billm and Numbski for helping with this!

billm found a bug in pfSense (related to my use of proxy arp and CARP at the same time) and is committing the fix today.

Go pfSense!

Martin

martin.beauchamp · Feb 28, 2007, 1:54 AM

I almost forgot hoba! He did a lot of the initial troubleshooting and agreed that I wasn't just a n00b who didn't RTFM (this time).

Thanks hoba!

Martin