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Enterprise network admins are probably familiar with Cisco’s HSRP which allows for router redundancy and VRRP for firewall redundancy. This article describes a way to achieve the same thing using features in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.5 release . Other commercial firewalls certainly have similar capability. However, OpenBSD’s feature set is becoming rather compelling.

Smaller businesses can certainly find value in such an approach, keeping their network available and secure at a fraction of the cost. Evening paying an outside consultant for installation and ongoing support would be cost effective. Deploy something like this and things remain comfortable for your cisco-trained network admins.

All of this of course reminds me that I really need to schedule some time to upgrade my own OpenBSD firewall.