Tutorial: Configuring UCARP/VRRP Failover Advanced Settings

Abstract

Configure the UCARP/VRRP failover VHID for Access Server when your setup requires this specific identifier.

Overview

This tutorial covers setting a unique VHID and configuring additional UCARP parameters for Access Server.

Prerequisites

Installed Access Servers configured for failover.
Console access (both nodes) with root privileges.
Proper planning to handle two failover events during the configuration.

Step 1: Adjust the VHID on the primary node

Connect to the primary node console and get root privileges.
Switch to the scripts directory:
```
cd /usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/
```

Adjust the VHID:

./sacli --key "ucarp.vhid" --value <NUMBER>1 ConfigPut
service openvpnas restart

1	Replace <NUMBER> with a value from 1 to 255.

Wait a full minute for the primary node to relay the new configuration to the secondary node.

Step 2: Restart the Access Server service on the secondary node

Connect to the secondary node console and get root privileges.
Restart the Access Server service:
```
service openvpnas restart
```

Step 3: Define extra parameters for UCARP (optional)

To pass additional parameters to UCARP, use the following command:
```
./sacli --key "ucarp.extra_parms" --value "<PARAMETERS>"1 ConfigPut
service openvpnas restart
```
1
Replace <PARAMETERS> with the desired UCARP parameters.

Step 4: Override UCARP up/down scripts (optional)

Suppose, for example, you want to override the standard scripts that Access Server uses when the node becomes active or has to be a standby node. In that case, you can pass new --upscript and --downscript parameters directly to UCARP and specify new scripts instead. For example, you could copy the original ucarp_standby and ucarp_active up/down scripts in the /usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/ directory and edit them to suit your needs. If you edit the scripts directly, they will be reset to standard whenever you upgrade or reinstall Access Server. Thus, we recommend creating copies of the up/down scripts to customize instead with the following commands.

Create your up/down scripts.

To override the default UCARP scripts:

./sacli --key "ucarp.extra_parms" --value "--upscript /root/up --downscript /root/down" ConfigPut
service openvpnas restart

To revert to the default scripts:

./sacli --key "ucarp.extra_parms" ConfigDel
service openvpnas restart

In this section: