pfSense

Scenario:

Given a virtual server, and an assigned load balancer pool, you want to enable/disable existing pool members (e.g. for maintenance)

Problem:

In order for load balancer pool changes to take effect, one must click apply. Doing so makes the virtual server unavailable for (about) 5-10 seconds. There is no warning that this will be the case.

Workaround:

If all one is doing is enabling/disabling an existing pool member, there is no need for a complete reload. Instead one can use:

relayctl host disable [id]
relayctl host enable [id]

This causes no such outage and seems to work as expected. This is preferable to going off-line for several seconds.

That said, going off-line when you do need to make (more involved) changes to the pool is sub-optimal. The "You must apply the changes in order for them to take effect." message should probably include a warning about the pending outage.