Heartbeat gateway

[Shahril M]

Hi,

I have 2 W2k AdvSvr boxes which are running Cluster Svc.

Is it the recommended practice to leave the default
gateway of the heartbeat NIC as blank?

TIA & Rgds,
Shahril

[Ron Kinner]

Yes, in fact giving a box more than one default gateway is generally a bad idea. A default gateway is only used when there is no other route available. If you give it two default gateways it doesn't know which to use and it gets confused. Rule is to point the default gateway at the Internet gateway on the NIC which connects to the Internet and if you have other NICs which connect to nonlocal networks to put in static routes using the route add command. If you don't have an Internet connection to worry about then chose the one which goes to the most networks so that you have to add the fewest static routes.

Ron

[Shahril M]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for replying.

What do you mean by static routes? What if I just leave the entry in the TCP/IP properties blank?


Rgds,
Shahril

[Richard J. Anthony]

'static' route is one you specify, while 'dynamic' route is one it gets from the DHCP server.

[Ron Kinner]

Leaving the entry blank is the correct thing to do.

Some systems are connected both to the internet via one network card and to a company wide network via the other. The company network could have more than one subnet. In order to tell the computer about the other subnets you would have to add static routes. This is done from a command (DOS) prompt with the command "route add." For example, suppose you had two NICs (Network Interface Cards) on your computer:

192.168.1.2 mask 255.255.255.0 with default gateway of 192.168.1.254 and 10.1.1.2 mask 255.255.255.0.

Say there was another network 10.1.2.0 255.255.255.0 which could be reached by going first to the router at 10.1.1.254 then you would need to add the static route:

route add 10.1.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 10.1.1.254 -p

The -p tells the PC to store the route in the registry so it will still be there after a reboot.

You can look at your routing table with the "route print" or "netstat -rn" or "netstat -r" commands.

Ron