Re: Network iface is down but pingable

Krzysztof Halasa (khc@intrepid.pm.waw.pl)
09 Oct 1999 21:51:48 +0200


David Ford <david@kalifornia.com> writes:

> if i load balance several NICs with a daemon, i'd feel pretty silly (stupid
> really) shelling to run a script to bring routes back up.

You can ask your daemon to add routes for you. I'm not sure if I like the
idea of automatic routes created by "ifconfig up", but using them you
already have a route to your peer/network when the interface is up.
A daemon like mrtd can add default and other routes for you without
any need for slow scripts.

> the ONLY affect NIC's status change should have on routing is marking routes
> dead or alive, NOT flushing them.
>
> the current method, pardon the bluntness, is a m$ way of doing it. knock
> down all the dominoes because one of them needs to go down, now set up the
> others that should stay up.

Not really. You only flush routes associated with the interface in question,
not the whole routing table. I'd be very surprised if I someday realize
that after rmmoding the driver I still have routes using it or even the
actual interface.

OTOH ifconfig up/down and rmmod/insmod are rather administrative tasks,
like adding or removing routes is. Linux doesn't currently have "link/
protocol down" state, but I think only that condition should mark routes
as dead without removing them from the table. That would be nice, BTW.

-- 
Krzysztof Halasa
Network Administrator

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