The table below defines two default routes, both having all-nets as the destination, but using two
different gateways. The first, primary route has the lowest metric and also has route monitoring
enabled. Route monitoring for the second, alternate route is not meaningful since it has no
failover route.
Route # Interface Destination Gateway Metric Monitoring
1 wan all-nets 195.66.77.1 10 On
2 wan all-nets 193.54.68.1 20 Off
When a new connection is about to be established to a host on the Internet, a route lookup will
result in the route that has the lowest metric being chosen. If the primary WAN router should
then fail, this will be detected by NetDefendOS, and the first route will be disabled. As a
consequence, a new route lookup will be performed and the second route will be selected with
the first one being marked as disabled.
Re-enabling Routes
Even if a route has been disabled, NetDefendOS will continue to check the status of that route.
Should the route become available again, it will be re-enabled and existing connections will
automatically be transferred back to it.
Route Interface Grouping
When using route monitoring, it is important to check if a failover to another route will cause the
routing interface to be changed. If this could happen, it is necessary to take some precautionary
steps to ensure that policies and existing connections will be maintained.
To illustrate the problem, consider the following configuration:
Firstly, there is one IP rule that will NAT all HTTP traffic destined for the Internet through the wan
interface:
Action Src Iface Src Net Dest Iface Dest Net Parameters
NAT lan lannet wan all-nets http
The routing table consequently contains the following default route:
Interface Destination Gateway Metric Monitoring
wan all-nets 195.66.77.1 10 Off
Now a secondary route is added over a backup DSL connection and route monitoring is enabled
for this. The updated routing table will look like this:
Route # Interface Destination Gateway Metric Monitoring
1 wan all-nets 195.66.77.1 10 On
2 dsl all-nets 193.54.68.1 20 Off
Notice that route monitoring is enabled for the first route but not the backup, failover route.
As long as the preferred wan route is healthy, everything will work as expected. route
monitoring will also be functioning, so the secondary route will be enabled if the wan route
should fail.
However, there are some problems with this setup: if a route failover occurs, the default route
will then use the dsl interface. When a new HTTP connection is established, a route lookup will
Chapter 4: Routing
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