How do you test firewall rules for a virtual IP address?

The problem was that I was trying to test from the OS access to a defined port on a remote host. Using telnet and snoop I could confirm that the firewall rules were all set up correctly and any access problems must be an application issue.

The ifconfig output looked like;
bge1: flags=201000843 mtu 1500 index 3
inet 10.106.53.88 netmask fffffff0 broadcast 10.106.53.95
bge1:1: flags=201000843 mtu 1500 index 3
inet 10.106.53.93 netmask fffffff0 broadcast 10.106.53.95


Tricky one this as everytime I tried a telnet it set it's source address to the underlying IP address (in this case 10.106.53.88) but I wanted to test access from 10.106.53.93.

Checking the routing table showed that the first entry for the local subnet (ie the one with the default gateway) was through the underlying interface (10.106.53.88). So, how to reverse this?
The answer was to set the base interface (in this case bge1) to deprecated and then the routing table entries swapped over and the source address was set to the floating IP.

Once all was confirmed working, just reverse the deprecated settings and then unset completely to return everything to its former state.

Syntax reminder;
Deprecated on;
ifconfig bge1 10.106.53.88 netmask 0xfffffff0 broadcast 10.106.53.95 deprecated up
Deprecated off;
ifconfig bge1 10.106.53.88 netmask 0xfffffff0 broadcast 10.106.53.95 -deprecated up


PS - Don't forget to cross your fingers and hope it doesn't screw up any running applications on the box :-)