[rescue] What To Do With An Ultra 60?

[Brian Hechinger]

> Which is more dangerous, administrative complexity or physical
> uncertainty?

depends what you do for a living.  if your connectivity is your life-blood,
then a little administrative complexity is well worth it.

> If I were them,
> I would put everything through a single FreeBSD firewall *and* have a
> fully configured 
> cold spare in the rack.  What would you replace that box with?

i personally would vote for the Resilience line of machines.

http://www.resilience.com/

but that's an expensive solution.  but, again, if your connectivity is how you
pay your bills, it pays to spend a couple extra bucks now to save yourself in
the future.

now if you want to use comodity PC gunk to do this, you could do something
like they do here where i work now.  a pair of firewall boxes, when the backup
notices the loss of the primary, it brings it's interfaces online, which just
so happen to have the same MAC address as the primary machine, so nobody even
notices, although you do lose your state on active connections and so certain
things may need to be restarted, but otherwise, un-noticable.  administrative
overhead?  once the machines are built, you just have to keep the firewall rules
in sync, it's automatic otherwise.

-brian