Changing a Smoothwall Appliance to Be the Master on a Failover Setup

If one of your smoothwall appliances fails, you can swap the roles of the failover devices.

Use the command line interface (CLI).

Procedure

1. PuTTY into the failover device on port 222. You need the root password.
2. Check the current settings of the failover in the CLI by going to /settings/heartbeat/. The settings and ha.cf files give you all the information about the failover setup.
3. Change the role of the box:
   1. In the CLI, go to /var/heartbeat/ and delete the file called settings.tar.gz.
   2. Go to /etc/ha.d/. There should be a file called nodeinfo in which the only word is either master or slave. Use vi or vim to access the file and to change the role of the box, change the word to master. Save and exit the file once done.
   3. Refresh the GUI, the box no longer has a notification at the top of the page stating that it is the failover.

The operation of the box isn't interrupted or negatively impacted but a reboot is required to restart the failover service with the new configuration.

After the reboot, generate a new failover archive and use this to install the settings on the new failover system.