News and Updates -- comments

Mon, 21 May 2007

Well, not so much goodness it turns out…

So while I have two pipes to the Internet now, there is some deeply buried magic in the kernel that is not happy about two default routes to the rest of the world. So I’m scaling back my plans at the moment.

I’ve dropped the Covad connection for now and will try to bring it back up once I replace the hard drive controller that I believe to be at fault in my oldest of machines. Once I have effectively a spare machine to play with, I may try again. It looks like I may need to track down an actual router daemon rather than relying on the kernel to keep track of what’s what. Unfortunately, it looks like Red Hat moved that to their cluster suite (I’ve not spent too much time looking for it yet).

I’ll update later when I know more. At the moment, I have 4 of my 5 IPs from Verizon seeming to work as promised and Covad says they have fixed their connection — but I need less confusing networking to verify that or prove them wrong.

4 comments

comments...

dan wrote

That is way too geeky for me.

David wrote

But...
If I could make it work, it would be cool. I'd be able to keep my Internet connection if either Covad or Verizon went down for any reason. Covad has been pretty flaky lately so most likely it would be down rather than Verizon. But theoretically, Verizon could go down while Covad was still up. Having both these paths up and running would keep my connection in either scenario. OK, it's silly, I admit that, but cool no less...

Jake wrote

Probably Already Seen this...
http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/10/2132252. I'm assuming that's what you're doing, but it just isn't happy with two default routes. I bet it's just a tweak to a kernel parameter. The article mentions changing the timeout for lost routes in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/route/gc_timeout.

David wrote

Thanks
That was news to me; I'll try that out if I can breathe life into my old machine. It seemed like the 4 additional IPs I'm hosting would just get lost with both connections configured. But I did not have all the settings mentioned in that article so maybe that would have fixed it...

Add a comment...