$500 - Replace SLBD with HOSTSTATED

firefly

The SLBD has been replaced by its author with HOSTSTATED. Hoststated is included with OpenBSD 4.1 and will be included with future releases. The hoststated support features not available in SLBD including HTTPS (if I'm not mistaken). I would be willing to increase the bounty if this could be done for the PfSense 1.2 final release including web GUI updates.

My guess is the compile of hoststated in FreeBSD should not be complex, but there would be work in updating the GUI.

sullrich

Hey thanks for opening this bounty as we have been discussing this already.

The biggest portion of this bounty is to change the syntax to match the new binary (hostated). When OpenBSD imported this they changed the backend syntax system. This is not a huge problem but it does require a lot of testing.

The other portion of this bounty is adding missing features. So please document which features you want added or otherwise will accept the features that we have now for the bountry price.

Sorry to be specific, but its helpful to have a complete description of the work at hand before confusion sets in :)

billm

@firefly:

The SLBD has been replaced by its author with HOSTSTATED. Hoststated is included with OpenBSD 4.1 and will be included with future

Not entirely correct. Hoststated (although it's original name was slbd due to pyr@ not realizing there already was an slbd) was written by Pierre-Yves Ritschard and is unrelated to slbd written by Jon Keim and maintained (somewhat poorly since hoststated came out) by myself.

–Bill

Edit - add a little more history

sullrich

Woops, I stand corrected. The questions remain for the bounty starter, regardless :) :)

firefly

For our needs we would like to replace Cisco PIX and Cisco Local Directors and combine the functionality using PfSense. We use LD to balance inbound connections on ports 80/tcp and 443/tcp (with sticky address). In the future SMTP 25/tcp will also be used.

We will assist in the testing for hoststated from command line and GUI when available.

Requirements:

port HOSTSTATED to FreeBSD. We can then perform testing without GUI. This is primary for us.
IPv4 require (IPv6 not used at present)
GUI interface to configure CHECK ICMP, HTTP, HTTPS (SEND, SSL, TCP optional for us)
GUI interface allowing to configure (add/remove) virtual hosts (ip or hostname, and port) and mappings to real hosts for ports HTTP, HTTPS (with sticky address option).
GUI interface allowing configuration of Backup Table. (service unavailble).
GUI interface to HOSTATECTL to enable/disable services, hosts
GUI interface to HOSTATECTL to show hosts, tables, service

If you can add hostated and GUI for the 1.2 release, we will double the bounty.

firefly

Bill,

I was unaware that there were multiple SLBD daemons from different authors, thank you for pointing this out. What advantage does your maintained version have to Pierre's SLBD or HostStated?

sullrich

Sorry but 1.2 is frozen so we cannot add it to that. But since 1.2 will be coming out soon we can start the bounty for 1.3 and then prepare testing snapshots.

firefly

No problem, the $500 bounty still stands. For our part, we will try to port HostStateD to PfSense for our own needs for now, and provide any useful information to the forum.