Re: OT: ASA Failover & Monitored Interfaces

Thanks!

How long did this interface remain as unknown? To Carlos' point, you need to make sure the timer expired (I'm sure you did, and I think it's 15 seconds). Can you tweak the poll time? Can you post your sh run fail output?

Regards,
Jay McMickle CCIE #35355
Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 24, 2013, at 10:56 PM, Joe Astorino <joeastorino1982_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the reply Jay and good luck on your lab man! To answer your
> questions and give you some more info:
>
> - This actually occurred on two different pairs. One pair is 8.4 and
> the other is 8.2
>
> - I did some testing and here is what I found. I don't understand it,
> but here is what I found : )
>
> One of the sub-interfaces we have on one of these pairs is not used
> for anything. Being a sub-interface it is of course 802.1Q and the
> switch connection on the other side is a trunk. So to simulate the
> issue, I simply pruned this VLAN from the trunk on the primary side so
> that the monitoring hello's on that interface would not reach the
> other side
>
> Interestingly, when running "show failover" the interface I was
> playing with does not show "failed" it shows "unknown". Because it is
> not "failed" failover will never occur. The only thing I can find
> about status "unknown" in the documentation is that it is the initial
> state and that the status cannot be determined.
>
> WTF is unknown? I mean, if I lose IP connectivity on a monitored
> interface shouldn't that be considered a failure? I've read all the
> ASA documentation about failover, failover triggers and health
> monitoring and I just don't get this.
>
> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:44 PM, Jay McMickle <jay.mcmickle_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>> It should indeed, but I agree, I too had this issue March 8, 2013 (yes, I remember the exact date as it was catastrophic).
>>
>> We have 5585-20's in HA A/S, with IPS 4270's inline with fail-close as well.
>>
>> I came unglued when this occurred, and Cisco stated this was a "software" issue but without any attributing bug. We are were running 9.0.1 on the ASA's (now 9.1.1-4), and could not reproduce the issue on our 5585-20/4270 lab hardware with the same IOS. The default failover is set for 1 interface, but to your point, if it doesn't mark it down, it won't failover. In the lab, it worked as expected. In production, it did not, but now does.
>>
>> May I ask what code on the ASA's your running?
>>
>> BTW- the IPS's locked up due to a bug in the 7.1(6)E4 IPS engine when signature 694 was pushed. Interesting to see if any of these variables were constants in your environment.
>>
>> I'm taking the Security IE lab on Wednesday of this week, and these little nuances made me a bit nervous!
>>
>> Cheers.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jay McMickle CCIE #35355
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Mar 24, 2013, at 10:17 PM, Joe Astorino <joeastorino1982_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I ran into an interesting situation tonight, and am trying to piece
>>> together what happened and what should happen. Pretty simple setup:
>>>
>>> 2 ASA's running in active standby. These ASA's have a number of
>>> interfaces and sub-interfaces all of which are monitored in the
>>> failover configuration. There are IPS units physically inline between
>>> these ASA's on most of the interfaces. The failover interface itself
>>> is of course a straight connection between the ASA's
>>>
>>> So, the IPS on the primary side "locked up" and it is set to
>>> fail-closed. From the inside network, the interfaces on the primary
>>> ASA were completely unreachable. I was unable to ping the interfaces
>>> at all. I was expecting that when this happened, the ASA's would
>>> trigger failover because several of the monitored interfaces were not
>>> reachable but they didn't. When logging into the standby unit,
>>> everything showed "normal" ...all the monitored interfaces were
>>> normal. As soon as I manually failed it over, that changed and the
>>> interfaces that were unreachable on the other side showed up as
>>> "failed".
>>>
>>> So basically, the ASA's were unable to communicate with each other
>>> over several of the monitored data-interfaces, but the status still
>>> showed "normal" until a manual failover was done. If the failover link
>>> is fine, but the ASA's cannot communicate via the monitored data
>>> interfaces shouldn't that trigger a failover event?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Joe Astorino
>>> CCIE #24347
>>> http://astorinonetworks.com
>>>
>>> "He not busy being born is busy dying" - Dylan
>>>
>>>
>>> Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________________________________
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>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Joe Astorino
> CCIE #24347
> http://astorinonetworks.com
>
> "He not busy being born is busy dying" - Dylan
>
>
> Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Subscription information may be found at:
> http://www.groupstudy.com/list/CCIELab.html

Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
Received on Mon Mar 25 2013 - 07:43:04 ART