BIRD

7 Jul 2000

      Hello Martin, Libor, Pavel, and Filovy,

Please help me, I'm desperate for a solution !!!

I'm using one of your creations, BIRD, as my Linux RedHat 6.2 
routing daemon. Nice job !! I do, however, have a problem with 
the latest version of BIRD.

My 2 Linux boxes have 3 network cards each. The topology of my
network is as follows:

         eth0    eth1                       eth1    eth0 
        -----BOX1-----------Internet------------BOX2----
 10.14.14.0/24 | 42.220.20.1         42.220.22.1  | 10.12.12.0/24
               |                                  |
               |eth2                              |eth2
               |                                  | 
         10.122.32.1                         10.122.42.1  

Based on the network above, I'm commanding BIRD to export the 
routes from eth0 and eth2, and to restrict eth1.

My problem is that BIRD is using eth1 as the default route for 
eth0 network.  I actually want BIRD to use eth2 as the gateway
for eth0.  I'm able to do this with Merit-GATED, however, Merit-GATED
is full of problems and basically unusable.

The strange thing is that each box, BOX1 and BOX2, show up a different
routing table when I execute the route command:

----------- route command output ------------

BOX1: (abbreviated)

Destination      Gateway       Iface
10.14.14.0/24    42.220.20.1   eth1 

BOX2: (abbreviated)

Destination      Gateway       Iface
10.12.12.0/24    10.122.42.0   eth2 

---------------------------------------------

BOX2 routing is what I was expecting, and it is correct.  
BOX1 routing is incorrect, not what I expected. I can't explain 
why BOX1 has a different routing that BOX2; each BOX have identical
builds and configuration files (with the obvious IP differences).

My question is:  How can I force BIRD to use eth2 as the Gateway
for the network in eth0 ???  

Is this a bug in BIRD?, or is BIRD not capable of handling this
interesting configuration. Yes, I do have a strange configuration
that requires eth0 network to be routed to eth2, but that's another
story.

Here are the bird.conf files for BOX1 and BOX2, respectively:

BOX1:
---------------------------------------------------------- 
protocol direct {
        interface "*";
}

protocol device {
        scan time 10;
}

protocol static{
        route 0.0.0.0/0 via 42.220.20.1;
}

protocol kernel {
        learn;
        persist;
        scan time 20;
        export all;
}

protocol ospf {
        area 0.0.0.0 {
                interface "*" {
                        type broadcast;
                        authentication simple;
                        password "xavier";
                };
        };
        export all;
        import all;
}
----------------------------------------------------------

BOX1:
---------------------------------------------------------- 
protocol direct {
        interface "*";
}

protocol device {
        scan time 10;
}

protocol static{
        route 0.0.0.0/0 via 42.220.22.1;
}

protocol kernel {
        learn;
        persist;
        scan time 20;
        export all;
}

protocol ospf {
        area 0.0.0.0 {
                interface "*" {
                        type broadcast;
                        authentication simple;
                        password "xavier";
                };
        };
        export all;
        import all;
}
---------------------------------------------------------

Pleae, I'm desperate for a solution. 

Please help :(

Xavier Lujan
Software Engineer 
xlujan@cityisp.net