CARP - a better VRRP

Reading through the latest FreeBSD status report, I came across this:

CARP is an alternative to VRRP. In contrast to VRRP it has full support for IPv6 and uses crypto to protect the advertisements. It was developed by OpenBSD due to concerns that the HSRP patent might cover VRRP and CISCO might defend its patent. CARP has, since then, improved a lot over VRRP.

I didn’t know the OpenBSD crew had come up with an alternative to VRRP/HSRP. Looks like FreeBSD will see it checked in for the 5.4 release. Patches are here at ucarp.org for the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.

Perhaps it’s time to revisit my firewall setup and move to a pair of OpenBSD boxes. At any rate I’m long overdue to take a recent BSD for a test drive. I really haven’t touched FreeBSD 5.x, which now appears to be stable. Ditto for OpenBSD — 2.8 was the last OpenBSD release I deployed. 3.6 is the current release! I’m so behind the times!