I have been trying for some time now to get static routing "truely" working on RHEL3 with NIC bonding and 802.1q vlan support, and nothing has worked except a hacked-up way of doing things.

First, does anyone know if RHEL3 uses /etc/sysconfig/static-routes, or /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-interfacename? I have tried both, and neither seem to work in this scenario.

I think that the problem may be that the bonding and vlan configurations force you to rename your ethernet devices. So, instead of having eth0 and eth1, I actually have: bond0.130 and bond0.140 as the named ethernet devices. I have tried using both the traditional names (ethX) and the newly configured ones, and neither seem to respond that well.

Any advice, syntax examples, etc??

Thanks in advance!

Strictly speaking your static routes should be pointing to an IP address as next hop, not an interface name. The only routes pointing at interfaces should be directly connected subnets.

Thanks for the info.

The static routes actually are other local subnets - for example:
a 10.0.0.0 route across our back-channel from co-lo to corporate.
172.16.13.0 needs to route to 172.16.18.0, etc.

My issue is more of a configuration issue than anything I think(?), or maybe the order in which files are read at boot time.

If I do not use the bonding/vlan drivers, static routing works perfectly pointed to eth0/eth1...

When I say local I mean local to the router not the site. A router has two basic types of route. Directly connected routes and indirect or learned routes from routing protocols. Static routes are considered to be a routing protocol for this purpose.

A connected route is a network for which the router has an interface which is a member of that network, i.e. an interface configured with an IP address belonging to that subnet. The router will have routes for these networks by default as they are derived from the interfaces. Any packets destined for these networks are arped for directly.

Any route which is indirect must point at a next hop address as the router needs to arp for the mac address of the gateway. It cannot arp for the mac address of the end host as the next hop is a router and routers are layer2 domain boundaries.

If you point an indirect route at a local interface you are basically confusing the whole issue and it may or may not work as the router cannot resolve the next-hop mac address and may attempt to arp for it directly and hope to get a proxy response which may or may not arrive depending on the ip stack of the routers concerned.

Its generally a bad idea on multi-access networks. Also if you do it this way the names don't matter.

hello guys,

i am really delighted to see this thread.....but i have a small problem with static routing. i installed clarckconnect 3.0 home edition as a core router for my network with with features of DNSmasq, ip forwarding, Loadbalancing, and static route for the indirect route on the distribution router.

Can anyone kindly assist me on how to populate the static route in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-interfacename ........in a step by step guide.i have tried all that i know but the static route disappears anytime i restart the PC.


Thanking you for your quick response.

Best Regards