Alternate static routes with procurve 2650

[Robert Maretic]

Hi

I am trying to setup an alternate static route on my procurve switch but I can't get it to work.

First I tried the following commands:

ip route 10.10.0.0/16 10.36.4.254
ip route 10.10.0.0/16 10.36.4.253

But the second route overwrites the first route.

In the documentation for the switch it is mentioned that it should be possible to setup
alternate routes by using the metric value.
But there are no examples and when I try to use a metric value it doesn't work.

ip route 10.10.0.0/16 10.36.4.253 1

I just get an invalid input error message.

Thanks in advance
Robert Maretic

[Ron Kinner]

The way I read it they expect to have dynamic routing sometime in the future and when they do the metrics will be used to choose which route to use. In the meantime all of the static routes have a default metric of 1.

Also if it were to work your
ip route 10.10.0.0/16 10.36.4.253 1
should probably be
ip route 10.10.0.0/16 10.36.4.253 2
since otherwise you are giving it the same metric as the first route. A Cisco would let you do that but then it would send one packet to the first route and the next to the second and the third to the first etc.

Finally, since this is static routing and both next hops are on the same LAN there would be no way for the switch to know that the first one was down and that it should use the second one unless it had a ping going all of the time and I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

In conclusion, you can't get there from here.

If your next hops are Cisco routers then you should use HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol) on the routers and point the static route to the HSRP virtual IP address and let the routers take care of deciding which one picks up the packet.

Ron

[Robert Maretic]

Hi again

I posted my question to the HP procurve support and their answer was that currently the 2650 switch does not support alternate routes.

According to them the following excerpt from the product documentation is a misprint:

###Start of excerpt###
Standard ??? the static route consists of the destination network address
and network mask, and the IP address of the next-hop gateway. You can
configure multiple standard static routes with the same metric for load
sharing or with different metrics to provide a primary route and backup
routes.
###End of excerpt###

Regards
Robert