Multipath Routing

[Oldach, Helge]

> I am no programmer, so forgive my ignorance in that respect, but why can't
a 
> metric be used to differentiate routes to the same destination network 
> within the routing table?  I happened to be googling and found:
> 
> http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_id=3878
> 
> which describes a patch to -STABLE that does exactly what I am talking 
> about.

Routing will always follow the better metric. That's the paradigm. So
if you have two routes the one with the better metric will always rule.

Frankly, I don't quite see the rationale for such a hack. This can be
solved using available mechanisms such as VRRP (or HSRP, if the gateways
are decent routers).

Furthermore:

  It doesn't detect when remote hosts are down. This is not the job of the
  kernel. It's not a routing protocol, it's not an automatic failover
system.

So what is this good for, that cannot be solved by already available
mechanisms?

Helge