[FW-1] Multiple default routes on Nokia

[Dan Hitchcock <DHitchcock@FW1-NOSPAMBREAKWATERSECURITY.COM>]

Title: Multiple default routes on Nokia

As with other routers, using multiple default routes will not (as you have observed) provide "poor man's load balancing".  You have a several options:

#1 - run BGP on your Nokia box (not recommended - this will kill an IP110)
#2 - run something more benign like RIP, run BGP on your border routers, and redistribute your BGP routes into RIP (this will probably also put quite a load on your firewall, and may become an administrative headache)

#3 - use a load-balancer product like RadWare or Foundry to dynamically share the load across the two links
#4 - "split the internet" by creating two routes to represent the internet.  For example, I've found in the past that a routing table like this will give a decent balance of traffic on the links (although this may vary greatly depending on the nature of traffic in your network):

        network         gateway
        0.0.0.0/1               router1
        128.0.0.0/2             router1
        0.0.0.0/0               router2

This will send addresses 0.0.0.0-191.255.255.255 out router1, and the rest out router2.  You could obviously just split in in half as well, but I found that to be lopsided in terms of utilization in my environment.

HTH - any comments, disagreements, etc are, as always, welcome.

Dan Hitchcock

>We have a Nokia (110) and two upstream routers in parallel and would
>like the firewall to use both paths. I added both router's IP addresses
>
>plug it back in, all the traffic reverts to the second route again. Is
>there any way to set it up to use both?