Tuning Route Cache

[Jon Radel]

On 1/18/17 11:55 AM, Dean E. Weimer wrote:
> I have been searching, but so far unsuccessfully found any hints. I have
> a situation that occurred with a FreeBSD server that is running 11.0
> that is in a DMZ with its default router directing traffic to other
> routers in the same subnet. we had one of those routers get swapped out
> last night. however the FreeBSD server still had the old router in its
> cache, and couldn't communicate with the remote sites.
> 

You don't seem to have gotten any responses, at least on the list, so
I'll take a stab at this.

I'm handicapped by a complete lack of knowledge as to how you're getting
those routes into the routing table in the first place.  You don't
really appear to say.  It appears that you're not using static routes,
as you expect things to happen automatically.  Are you using a routing
protocol (RIP, etc.).  Are you counting on Router Discovery working? Are
you depending on ICMP Redirects?

Have you confirmed that the appropriate routing daemon is actually
running?  Have you confirmed that the routers are actually advertising
routes correctly?

As far as I recall, the *longest* time that you should have stale routes
hanging around is 30 minutes if you use Router Discovery with the
default settings.  Everything else should, unless you really break it,
converge much faster than that.  See

man 8 routed

for more on some of that, including reducing the 30 minutes.


> I need to find a way to shorten this cache, I understand why its there
> to prevent repeated lookups, this doesn't happen all the time but I am
> thinking if I could change this cache length to a couple of hours this
> would have saved me a lot of trouble. As the routes would have cleared
> out over night and when users got back on the network in the morning
> everything would have been working.

The routing table really doesn't work like that.  If you're using static
routing, nothing changes until you tell it to.  If you're using a
routing protocol then a daemon is responsible for adding and removing
routes based on what it learns, and routes that are no longer advertised
by a router go away pretty quickly.  Even if you want routes learned
from an ICMP Redirect to be cleaned up automatically, you'll need routed
to do it for you.  See the above referenced man page.


-- 
--Jon Radel
jon at radel.com

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