[Glastonbury] routing tables

[Martin WHEELER]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Nick Irwin wrote:

> In a routing table, should it be the most specific routes first
 . . .
> or the other way round?

Interesting question.
I've never really thought about it.
My own tendency (with no real reasoning behind it) is towards organising
in lowest-to-highest order, whilst retaining the order I first found in
a pre-written /etc/network/interfaces table; viz. :

***********************************************************************

# The loopback interface
auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
   address 127.0.0.1
   netmask 255.0.0.0

# The network (ethernet card) interface
auto eth0

iface eth0 inet static
   address 192.168.xxx.yyy
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   gateway 192.168.mmm.nnn

# to set up the multicast route automatically at system startup
# (required by cupsys)

   up route add -net  224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev eth0
   down route del -net  224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev eth0

***********************************************************************


> Also where do the default gateway and loopback addresses fit in? should they
> be at the top or the bottom?

I have a tendency to put loopback first; gateway later.

I haven't tried messing about with order to see what breaks   {8-)


And my /etc/networks looks like:

root at mybox:~# less /etc/networks
loopback        127.0.0.0
localnet        192.168.0.0
eth0_netmask    255.255.255.0
/etc/networks (END)


HTH.
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
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