Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Early Returns: Franz: 1 VMWare+CARP+FreeBSD: 0

So running FreeBSD 6.2 CARP on VMWare Server is the subject of some confusion and struggling for me today. This closed CARP bug turned out to be a red herring and this VMTN thread made it seem that it was only possible to use CARP on ESX (if you enable promiscous mode on the virtual switch) and/or possibly with VMWare workstation with teaming. But I don't have admin privs on the ESX cluster. And I want to be able to do development and testing on my laptop and our VMWware Server.

On the drive home I remembered similar battle battle I faced a year ago working with the SCADA Honeynet where broadcast traffic (ARP Requests) were being forwarded to a virtual interface but the unicast was failing. Today pings to the CARP interface were failing even though I had an ARP entry on the host I was pinging from and of course the ICMP Echos were going out--but not making it to the virtual interface.

So it looks like once again loosening permissions on /dev/vmnet[0-9] is the solution to the problem.

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