Failover Mechanisms for Filtering Bridges on the BSDs

Massimiliano Stucchi

There is widespread use of filtering bridges as a means to seamlessly integrate a firewalling or traffic shaping solution inside existing networks. However, they are so useful that we rarely realize they represent a single point of failure (SPoF), being able to bring our entire network down in a matter of seconds. This talk will focus on the different failover methods available today on all the BSDs, starting from a case history, down to a little overview of the bridging code itself, along with a basic description of how bridging works.

About the Author

Massimiliano Stucchi is a 21 year old geek living in Milan, Italy. He makes his day either as a computer science student at the university of Milan-Bicocca, or working in his own company, offering VoIP and web services, as much as consultancy. Max also serves in the staff of the Italian FreeBSD Users Group (GUFI), and he is involved in the FreeSBIE project as webmaster, mirror master, and random coder (in the sense that the code he writes behaves randomically...). In his free time he enjoys meeting up in OpenLabs, watching WTA Tour tennis, and coaching a junior soccer team.

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