Hi.
Last week in my company we had a problem: because of parameter
ip_ire_gw_probe our DNS (runing on HP-UX) stoped with forwarding packets to
its default gateway, because on gateway we have firewall and policies which
doesn't allow ICMP traffic.

I have a question: is it somewhere defined behaviour of that machine(i.e.
RFC), which says that it has to or should check if its default gateway is
available or is it specific for HP-UX?

--
best regards,
Witek

Witek <witek_1308@poczta.onet.pl> wrote:
> I have a question: is it somewhere defined behaviour of that machine(i.e.
> RFC), which says that it has to or should check if its default gateway is
> available or is it specific for HP-UX?

This is an HP specific thing. I wrestled with this a couple of weeks
ago during the spat of MS virus attacks. From a stratospheric viewpoint,
it makes some sense. If the router isn't there, then constantly waiting
for timeouts doesn't do anything except delay network traffic.
Unfortunately, as you get deeper into the issue, HP's technique doesn't
work as well as one would hope.

In case you haven't gotten the fix for it yet, you can turn this feature
off by:

1. ndd -set /dev/ip ip_ire_gw_probe 0
2. Flush and reinstate the route
a. route delete ...
b. route add ...

Also, this feature doesn't exist on 10.20 boxes; if you still have
any of those, they can/will still be working just fine.

Doug




--------
Senior UNIX Admin
O'Leary Computer Enterprises
dkoleary@attbi.com (w) 630-904-6098 (c) 630-248-2749
resume: http://home.attbi.com/~dkoleary/resume.html

thank you for your answer!

--
best regards,
Witek