The Command Line Interface
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OmniAccess 5740 Unified Services Gateway CLI Configuration Guide
Alcatel-Lucent
BACKUP INTERFACE
When a primary interface goes down, an alternate interface in lieu of this primary 
interface can be brought up with the backup interface support. 
The backup interface is more useful for the WAN interfaces when compared to the 
LAN interfaces. Most of the times, the dial on demand interfaces (like ISDN 
interfaces) act like backup interfaces for the regular WAN interfaces (like Serial/
T1/E1). But, technically nothing stops in utilizing one interface as backup to 
another interface with the exception of Loopback interfaces and bridged 
interfaces. 
Usually the primary interface and the backup interface belong to the same subnet 
(they can have the same IP address) so that when the primary interface goes 
down, the same connected route gets added to routing table on the backup 
interface because of which static routes, routing protocols, etc., would work as is 
without any human intervention. But the features like firewall, policies, etc., that 
are applied on the primary interface would not be automatically applied to the 
backup interfaces. In typical scenarios, these feature configurations are also 
duplicated on to the backup interfaces. 
The backup interface backs up only one primary interface. When an interface is 
specified as backup interface, it cannot be used for regular packet forwarding till 
the primary interface goes down. The state of a backup interface is 'standby' as 
long as primary interface is up.
T
O CONFIGURE A BACKUP INTERFACE
EXAMPLE
ALU(config-if GigabitEthernet3/0)# backup interface Serial1/0:0
ALU(config-if GigabitEthernet3/0)# no backup interface Serial1/
0:0
Command (in ICM) Description
backup interface <interface-
name>
Enter this command in the Interface 
Configuration mode.
This command is used to configure an 
interface as a backup interface.
no backup interface 
<interface-name>
This command is used to remove an 
interface as a backup interface.