3 ms·

I see this when poking around on routers and such, but I always wonder if it is useful or common to see for consumers. Is this something that only ISPs will im

by chaxor 3y ago

I see this when poking around on routers and such, but I always wonder if it is useful or common to see for consumers. Is this something that only ISPs will implement? Or is it closer to the acceptable self hosted solutions like running pihole? It seems only useful for like 0.1% of the year if something goes very wrong? I don't think I have understood it enough to know why I might even be interested in using it.

nullindividual 3y ago
High availability isn't 'useful' or 'common' to consumers [home equipment]; consumer-class ISP services would generally be incompatible with highly available routers (dual WAN/ISP on a single router is going to be more common). I used CARP for HAProxy in lab environments, but that is as 'close to home' as it got. CARP is useful for any time you need to take a service down residing behind CARP. Updating an HAProxy box, for example. Failover/disable the node you'll be performing maintenance on, which is >0.1% of the year.
DrPhish 3y ago
I'm an OG OpenBSD user (literal 386 firewall) so I've been using it at home since before CARP was released. When the first CARP release hit I immediately set it up on a pair of SUN Ultra1 pizza boxes I had gotten on eBay after the .com crash (with a third cold-spare) and ran that way for years. My ISP even called me at one point to find out what "those weird mac addresses" were on the SUN hardware. They, of course, ended up being too power hungry and I moved to PC-Engines Alix boxes. When I wanted more horsepower as my internet speed increased, I moved first to a pair of PC-Engines APU boxes, and now to one APU and one virtualized OpenBSD firewall. CARP has always been rock solid throughout, both on the internal and external interfaces of my firewalls. Rolling reboots for patches, updates, OS upgrades or hardware failures are a non-issue. No one in my family ever notices. Combine that with multi-homed ISPs and the internet at my house is more solid than a lot of enterprises and there's no expensive hardware or software involved. I guess that was a long-winded way to say: Home consumers CAN benefit from high availability! It just isn't packaged in an easy to use or cheap enough form factor for them.

by chaxor 3y ago

nullindividual 3y ago

High availability isn't 'useful' or 'common' to consumers [home equipment]; consumer-class ISP services would generally be incompatible with highly available routers (dual WAN/ISP on a single router is going to be more common). I used CARP for HAProxy in lab environments, but that is as 'close to home' as it got. CARP is useful for any time you need to take a service down residing behind CARP. Updating an HAProxy box, for example. Failover/disable the node you'll be performing maintenance on, which is >0.1% of the year.

DrPhish 3y ago

I'm an OG OpenBSD user (literal 386 firewall) so I've been using it at home since before CARP was released. When the first CARP release hit I immediately set it up on a pair of SUN Ultra1 pizza boxes I had gotten on eBay after the .com crash (with a third cold-spare) and ran that way for years. My ISP even called me at one point to find out what "those weird mac addresses" were on the SUN hardware. They, of course, ended up being too power hungry and I moved to PC-Engines Alix boxes. When I wanted more horsepower as my internet speed increased, I moved first to a pair of PC-Engines APU boxes, and now to one APU and one virtualized OpenBSD firewall. CARP has always been rock solid throughout, both on the internal and external interfaces of my firewalls. Rolling reboots for patches, updates, OS upgrades or hardware failures are a non-issue. No one in my family ever notices. Combine that with multi-homed ISPs and the internet at my house is more solid than a lot of enterprises and there's no expensive hardware or software involved. I guess that was a long-winded way to say: Home consumers CAN benefit from high availability! It just isn't packaged in an easy to use or cheap enough form factor for them.