Setting up the failover in the main Smoothwall

Prerequisite

• Adding a connection to the heartbeat interface.

Procedure

1. In the main Smoothwall, on the SYSTEM menu, under the Hardware submenu, click Failover.
2. Under the Heartbeat section, click Enabled.
3. If you want the failover unit to hand back control to the main when the main starts to respond after a hardware failure automatically, click Auto failback.
4. From the Keep-alive internal list, select the interval after which the main and failover unit communicate to make sure that the main is still working. The default is 1 second. In non-congested networks, we recommend a very short interval. It is undetectable in terms of system performance.
5. From the Dead time list, select how long after the failover unit has become aware that the main is no longer responding it should wait before taking over from the main.
6. Under the Networking section, enter a Master heartbeat IP address for the main system.
7. Enter a Failover heartbeat IP address for the failover unit, enter a Netmask, and click Save.
8. On the SYSTEM menu, under the Maintenance submenu, click Shutdown.
9. Select Immediately and click Reboot. The browser refreshes back to the sign-in page once the reboot has completed.

Follow-up task

• Generating a failover archive.