Scriblings Of A GEEK

vgpd aka Virtual Gateway Protocol Daemon

Found a application similar to HSRP on Linux by Marco Tizzoni and does HSRP Kinda stuff on Linux

It is called the Virtual Gateway Protocol Daemon

I have tired it out and has the same features as HSRP but remmeber it is not compatible with HSRP
The best part about this application is that it puts log entries with the default log deamon which is syslogd on most systems.

You can access this deamon via http://vgpd.freaknet.org/

A few words before you go on to have a test run at it.

1. It requires gcc version > 3.0 which i guess is on all the systems
2. You need to generate a sha key for it to start so that it can be run. I feel this is not documented properly but you can generate a key and place it in a file :

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 47 Jan 17 01:42 /etc/vgp-key

The way to run is :

vgpd -a 192.168.0.95 -i eth0 -p 100

You can specify the group and also by default -l or --log option is on to log to default system logger deamon.

A snip from the messages file is below :

Jan 17 01:42:53 jabber vgpd[4043]: vgpd started, entering initialization phase...
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: Interface : eth0
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: Virtual interface : eth0
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: vgp priority set to : 0x64
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: vgp group set to : 0x01
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: Hello time : 2
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: Hold time : 6
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: Virtual IP : 192.168.0.95
Jan 17 01:42:53 my_test_sys vgpd[4043]: Virtual MAC : 00:00:5E:00:01:01
Jan 17 01:42:56 my_test_sys vgpd[4044]: set_ipaddr(): Successfully set ip address: 192.168.0.95

I have tried it out and it works great.

Remember it is not compatible with HSRP on cisco router's / MLS switches.

Coming up how dynamic DNS can ease up your life if you use DHCP Server on the network to give IP addr's to the client machine and this one is specially for my good friend Nikhil whos alwayz got a machine for me to test new stuff on.

Nitin

posted by Nitin @ 1/17/2005 01:57:00 PM