default route didn't appear at reboot

[Maria Bennett]

K460 antique, running 10.20. Person standing at console saw NIC errors but couldn't articulate. System had not been rebooted for 4 months, came back up after reboot but did not pick up default gateway. There were a lot of fingers in the pot but I think I got the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file copied off before the person at the console ran route add... to re-establish visibility on the net. When I performed the post mortum, there was no change to the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file. Is that where route add puts it? Has this happened to anyone else? Thanks!

[Chris Wilshaw]

The route add command only adds the route in on a temporary basis. You need to manually add an entry to netconf to make the change permanent.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

'route add ...' is a soft change - it won't be persistent across reboots. An entry for your default route also needs to appear in the netconf file.

HTH

Duncan

[Pete Randall]

Maria,

You need to put entries like this into the netconf file:

ROUTE_DESTINATION[0]=default
ROUTE_MASK[0]=""
ROUTE_GATEWAY[0]=130.1.0.248
ROUTE_COUNT[0]=1
ROUTE_ARGS[0]=""


Pete

[Mel Burslan]

Maria,

Check your /etc/rc.log and see what failure messages system has logged at the bootup when it tried to start networking.

If you see something like "network interface is not available, unable to set route" or something like that, make sure in the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file, your route statements, which looks like Pete's example above, are placed below all the network interface definitions, as the system goes through these in a sequential manner. By network interface definitions, I mean the lines like this, and you may have multiple blocks looking like that:

INTERFACE_NAME[0]=lan0
IP_ADDRESS[0]=192.168.35.101
SUBNET_MASK[0]=255.255.252.0
BROADCAST_ADDRESS[0]=
INTERFACE_STATE[0]=up
DHCP_ENABLE[0]=0


And I have seen netconf files messed up this way with too many cooks in the kitchen, having this problem.

[Maria Bennett]

Configure LAN interfaces
Output from "/sbin/rc2.d/S008net.sd start":
----------------------------
ERROR: usage: add destination [netmask mask] gateway [metric]
"/sbin/rc2.d/S008net.sd start" FAILED

Could this be my culprit?

[Mel Burslan]

Yup, that is the error related but it does not look like it is related to the ordering of entries but it looks more like somebody fatfingered something in your route statements. Check missing quotation marks and or some invisible characters. At some time, someone may have been editing this file and in the middle of process their terminal session may have messed up and corrupted some lines.
If you can copy/paste the lines starting with word ROUTE from /etc/rc.config.d/netconf, it would be helpful to figure out

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Maria,

Another common mistake in the netconf file is not having unique index numbers for each interface entry & for each route statement.

HTH,
Jeff

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Can you post your ROUTE entries from netconf?. Looks like there is a typo or something that is causing the route command executed in /sbin/init.d/net script to fail.

-Sri

[Jeroen Peereboom]

Can SAM do this too?

JP

[Dave Hutton]

#set_parms addl_netwrk will also make the changes to the file as needed.

[Mel Burslan]

sam usually puts in the correct entries but I am not sure if it checks the validity of netconf entries.
One thing I do not like SAM doing about networking is, setting a lan card to 100FD, where SAM is (or at least 'was') putting the MAC address of the interface into the driver config file which is not required and may cause trouble when the card gets changed down the road.
So, needless to say, I am not a big fan of SAM when it comes to networking. Hence I can not tell if it does something bad or finds any mistakes made previously.

[Maria Bennett]

Folks, I cannot post the file due to it being a DoD system. I appreciate all the good feed back. This has been a difficult time with a lot of finger pointing which is wasted energy rather than concentrating on the problem. I'm going over the netconf file with one of the senior people here and hopefully we'll find the problem. Thanks to everyone for their feedback. -Maria