Howto – Implement policy routing on Linux

Problem Description

You have built two or more network cards into one Linux system and each of these cards has its own default gateway. By default, you can only have one default gateway on a system. The case described would lead to asynchronous routing, whereby the router would reject the packets as appropriate.

Solution

The iproute2 program, which is included in all current Linux distributions and already installed even, as a rule, can be used for the solution of this problem. Normally, a Linux system only has one routing table, in which only one default gateway can make entries. With iproute2, you have the ability to setup an additional routing table, for one thing, and allow this table to be used by the system based on rules, for another.

Initial Position

We will assume that we have two interfaces: eth0 and eth1. The two networks that should be used are 192.168.0.0/24 and 10.10.0.0/24, whereby the first IP address in each respective network should be the gateway. Under Debian, the initial configuration would appear as follows. /etc/network/interfaces

$ sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system 
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). 
# The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface 

allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet static     
     address 192.168.0.10     
     netmask 255.255.255.0     
     gateway 192.168.0.1 

# The secondary network interface allow-hotplug eth1 iface eth1 inet static     
     address 10.10.0.10     netmask 255.255.255.0 

Adding a Second Routing Table

To add a new routing table, the file, /etc/iproute2/rt_tables must be edited. We will call the routing table “rt2” and set its preference to 1.

$ sudo vi /etc/iproute2/rt_tables

#
# reserved values
#
255     local
254     main
253     default
0       unspec
#
# local
#
#1      inr.ruhep
rt2

Configuring the New Routing Table

From this point, four commands are needed to achieve our goal. First, the new routing table needs to be populated, which is done using the following command.

$ sudo ip route add 10.10.0.0/24 dev eth1 src 10.10.0.10 table rt2
$ sudo ip route add default via 10.10.0.1 dev eth1 table rt2 

The first command says that the network, 10.10.0.0/24, can be reached through the eth1 interface. The second command sets the default gateway.

Routing Rules

So that the system knows when to use our new routing table, two rules must be configured.

$ ip rule add from 10.10.0.10/32 table rt2 ip rule add to 10.10.0.10/32 table rt2 

These rules say that both traffic from the IP address, 10.10.0.10, as well as traffic directed to or through this IP address, should use the rt2 routing table.

Making the Configuration permanent

The ip rule and ip route commands will become invalid after a re-boot, for which reason they should become part of a script (for example, /etc/rc.local) that will be executed once the network has been started after booting. For Debian, these command can also be written directly into the /etc/network/interfaces file, which would then appear as follows.

$ sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

iface eth1 inet static
	address 10.10.0.10 
	netmask 255.255.255.0
	post-up ip route add 10.10.0.0/24 dev eth1 src 10.10.0.10 table rt2
	post-up ip route add default via 10.10.0.1 dev eth1 table rt2
	post-up ip rule add from 10.10.0.10/32 table rt2
	post-up ip rule add to 10.10.0.10/32 table rt2

More than Two Network Cards or Gateways

If there are more than two networks, a routing table can be created for each additional network analogous to the example presented above.

Testing the Configuration

The following commands can be used to ensure that the rules as well as the routing entries are working as expected.

$ sudo ip route list table rt2 
$ sudo ip rule show