There is progress in getting three new public IPs for the new gateways. The request has been confirmed and added to the database; now I’m just waiting for the final completion, which hopefully will happen by the time we get the new quad NICs we ordered last week — which we’ll probably get tomorrow or on wednesday.

Since this is the first time I’m mentioning the “new gateways”, I’ll explain shortly how it will work; we’ll install OpenBSD 4.8 on two of the new infrastructure machines (Supermicro Twin2^2). They’ll be set up with pf and CARP. The latter gives us redundancy by using a virtual interface that is shared between all participating servers, so that if one goes down, another will take over.

We’ll install the two quad NICs we’ve ordered in these two nodes. Then we’ll use 2 NICs towards CERNs GPN-network (General Purpose), 2 NICs towards our local network, and 1 NIC between the two nodes. This will, if all goes according to plan, give us at least 2Gbps throughput. It should also be possible to load-balance between all participating CARP-servers, so that it should be possible to get 4Gbps throughput.