Two interfaces, both with status of MASTER

[sfjacobs]

We running pfsense in high availability mode.  We have two physcial pfsense firewalls with 15 vlans each.  One of those vlans is showing MASTER on both firewalls.  By that I mean when I go into the pfsense web interface and look at STATUS/CARP, firewall one shows all interfaces as MASTER, and when I go to the other firewall and look at STATUS/CARP it shows all interfaces as BACKUP, except for the last one, which is labeled OPT15_VIP21.  While pfTOP shows packet flow for both interfaces, it shows far more on firewall 1.  Also, when I make a rule change on firewall 1 it is replicated on firewall 2, but when I make a change on firewall 2 it is not replicated on firewall 1.  I've looked in the system log but don't see any references to OPT15_VIP21.

Any suggestions as to how to get firewall 2 to change the status of the interface from MASTER to BACKUP?

Thanks.

Seth

[jace]

this happened to me as well. in my case, the solution was regarding the tagging on switches. i wasn't been able to trunk my BACKUP's interface on switches. so after trunking, the master/backup worked as well as the transfer of DHCP lease.

[jimp]

The master/backup status is purely a layer 2 or lower decision. If they are both master, then the secondary is not seeing the advertisements from the primary, indicating that they are being blocked or not delivered properly.

Either they aren't on the same layer 2, or something is blocking the CARP multicast heartbeats.