>> if you've just got an ethernet card 90% of the time, which is attached >> to >> a single closed subnet, and occasionally dial up via a modem, then you >> really should not assign the default route to your ethernet card. Just >> don't have one, let pppd sort that out for you. > > This is a valid workaround, and is appliccable depending on your LAN > setup. > For more complex LAN setups it won't work. To do things properly, you'll > need to fix the problem, and that's your ppp setup.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by work-around. As far as I can tell, the problem described is that there is default route somewhere pointing to an IP address on one of his ethernet cards, and then when he connects to the internet pppd comes along and attempts to re-assign the default route. Somewhere in here things are getting screwed up. The default route is basically saying "everything that you don't know about, send to this router". Now if his local ethernet cards are somehow connected to the internet, then having a default route on them is valid, but that isn't the case described, so it is invalid. If he has a complex internal network, with a lot of different subnets, and he doesn't want to statically assign a route to each one, then he should run a routing protocol such as RIP, OSPF, or IGRP. Using the default route as a way of avoiding lots of static routes is not the correct thing to do - that is the whole point of routing protocols. The solution I provided isn't a work-around, as there doesn't seem to be a problem with ppp (except that it is exposing the flaw in his network config), it is the correct solution - unless I am misunderstanding the problem? Cheers, Andre
