Flip timeout

Flip timeout

The HA remote IP monitoring configuration also involves setting a flip timeout. The flip timeout is required to reduce the frequency of failovers if, after a failover, HA remote IP monitoring on the new primary unit also causes a failover. This can happen if the new primary unit cannot connect to one or more of the monitored remote IP addresses. The result could be that until you fix the network problem that blocks connections to the remote IP addresses, the cluster will experience repeated failovers. You can control how often the failovers occur by setting the flip timeout. The flip timeout stops HA remote IP monitoring from causing a failover until the primary unit has been operating for the duration of the flip timeout.

If you set the flip timeout to a relatively high number of minutes you can find and repair the network problem that prevented the cluster from connecting to the remote IP address without the cluster experiencing very many failovers. Even if it takes a while to detect the problem, repeated failovers at relatively long time intervals do not usually disrupt network traffic.

Use the following command to set the flip timeout to 3 hours (360 minutes):

config system ha

set pingserver-flip-timeout 360 end


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This entry was posted in FortiOS 5.4 Handbook and tagged , on by .

About Mike

Michael Pruett, CISSP has a wide range of cyber-security and network engineering expertise. The plethora of vendors that resell hardware but have zero engineering knowledge resulting in the wrong hardware or configuration being deployed is a major pet peeve of Michael's. This site was started in an effort to spread information while providing the option of quality consulting services at a much lower price than Fortinet Professional Services. Owns PacketLlama.Com (Fortinet Hardware Sales) and Office Of The CISO, LLC (Cybersecurity consulting firm).

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