Josh wrote:
quoted text
> Hello, A quick question.
> 
> I have a pair of 4.1 boxes acting as firewalls using carp/pfsync etc.
> 
> The primary has advskew 0, the backup has advskew 100. I have 
> net.inet.carp.preempt=1 on both.
> 
> So anyway, I was downloading some 4.2 install binaries onto the backup 
> fw, and I noticed that the backup/primary carp interfaces kept on 
> switching between master/backup fairly rapidly ( around every 5 - 10 
> seconds or so ) despite both hosts being up just fine.
> 
> Any ideas on what might be causing this?
> 
> Also, My understanding of net.inet.carp.preempt=1 needs to be adjusted I 
> think; I thought that it meant if one carp interface goes down, ie, 
> unplugged or whatever, then the rest go down, ie all other interfaces on 
> the box? Is this right?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
>    Josh
> 
Your understanding of preempt seems correct

I had a similar issue on a pair of 4.1 FW's.

A careful examination revealed that one of the carp ifaces on one system 
had ip addrs that were missing on the other.


Carefully compare ifconfig -aA on each machine to each other.
I now slavishly alsoensure that the addrs occur in the same order ... I 
am sure that has no effect, but there it is.


Are you allowing the carp traffic in and out?
Does a tcpdump show the expected traffic?.