Bug 498472

The old report refers to metric  on the gateway route, not the network route.

The contortions your patch goes through implies to me there should be a better way to set this.

The "contorsions" are needed for the following reasons:
_ Kernel always sets an interface route with metric 0. No way to configure that.
_ Metric is part of the route "index": you cannot change the metric of a route, you only can build another route, cloned from the kernel one, but with another metric.
_ Since it has been made available to all scripts, the set_kernel_metric() function has been designed to be very general. In particular, it does not assume the original route metric is 0, in case someone needs to change the metric more than once for the same interface route.

    [ -z "$3" ] && return 0

If no metric is given, no change.

    if_route=`ip route list exact "$1" dev "$2" proto kernel`

Gets the full configured kernel route into `if_route'.

    [ -z "$if_route" ] && return 1

If no such route, error.

    if_metric=`echo "$if_route" |
      sed -e '/metric /!d' -e 's/^.*metric \([0-9]*\).*$/\1/'`

Gets the current metric from the route.

    if_metric=${if_metric:-0}

Makes sure it is numeric, even in the case metric was not mentioned (implicit 0).

    [ "$3" -eq $if_metric ] && return 0

If there is no metric change, we're done.

    if_route=`echo "$if_route dev $2 proto kernel" | sed 's/metric [0-9]*//'`

Modifies the route to force "proto kernel" and include the device, but not the metric.

    ip route add $if_route metric "$3" || return 1

Adds the same route with the new metric, exit if error.

    ip route del $if_route metric $if_metric

Deletes the original route. Exit with this command's status.


If you could find some shorter way to obtain the same result, I'll take it :-) But I really need this feature: it allows to control local routing by simple calls to ifup/ifdown. These calls can be automatically handled by ifplugd (for example). Since this is LOCAL routing, this feature cannot be handled by some dynamic routing manager (i.e.: quagga).

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Reassigning to F12: the feature has not yet been made available.

Although this feature has been rejected for inclusion in RHEL6, I really need it in Fedora: it allows me to implement a pair of "poor man's redundant routers" with the help of MAC address alteration, arp_filter=1 and ifplugd.
There is one router active at a time, the other is considered as backup and works like a normal LAN-connected machine.
Each router has a dedicated permanent LAN connection for its private use. The active router is also connected to the routing points (LAN-gateway, DMZ and Internet).
Switching the routers simply consists in unpluging the LAN gateway, DMZ and Internet connections from the active router and replugging them to the backup router. The internal routing of both machines automatically changes accordingly.

This configuration works perfectly well for about 9 months here (with an average of 1 router switch per week) and would not be easily feasible without the kernel metric change feature.

Quagga is not an appropriate solution since it consumes too many IPs and alters external routes only.

Until now, I report my patch within each release of initscripts to support this feature.

Many thanks for reading and for reconsidering the implementation of this feature. I'll be glad to give you more info on my config if you need so.

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Reassigning to F14: feature not yet available.

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