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To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>
cc: "Christoph P. Kukulies" <kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de>,
        freebsd-questions@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject: Re: route command w/o metrics (why?) 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 03 Jun 1996 09:44:45 EDT."
             <9606031344.AA28071@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> 
From: bmah@cs.berkeley.edu (Bruce A. Mah)
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Date: Mon, 03 Jun 1996 08:29:40 -0700
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Garrett Wollman writes:
> <<On Mon, 03 Jun 1996 10:21:13 +0200, "Christoph P. Kukulies" <kuku@gilberto.
> physik.rwth-aachen.de> said:
> 
> > Just out of curiousity: Why does the BSD route command not require
> > a metrics parameter?
> 
> Why would it require one?  What purpose would it serve?

Well for starters, you could use a route with metric > 1 to set a 
backup route, in case a lower-metric route (configured using RIP or 
OSPF) went away.  In most networks, this wouldn't be real useful 
because all of the routes would be advertised using a routing protocol 
anyways.  However I've used it in situations where for administrative 
reasons I didn't have advertised routes through all of the links I was 
connected to.  (If this was a bit vague on details, I'm trying to spare 
you the boring details of an experimental network setup we had here at 
Berkeley up until recently.)

But for most situations (e.g. single-homed host, or multi-homed host 
running a routing protocol for all attached links) you're right, this 
doesn't serve a purpose.

As a historical point, older BSD versions used to use the metric to 
distinguish between routes to directly-attached networks and routes 
through gateways.  I always wondered why it couldn't figure this out 
from the list of interfaces in kernel.

Cheers,

Bruce.