Gateway failover - Single interface

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hi,
I have a single ethernet interface that connects to a downstream router (which I don’t control) which then connects to 2 DSL lines.
I’d like to use one of the DSL lines as my primary connection, and only use the other in a failover scenario.

What Ive done so far:

  • added 2 gateways - one to each DSL line, with a routing distance of 1 and 20 respectively.
    added a ping-check netwatch and up/down scripts to switch the routing distance between the 2 gateways.
    added a static route to the internet host I want to ping-check and made it go though the primary gateway.

I’m stuck on the last part - forcing the ping-check to always fail for the failover gateway.
I’ve seen posts saying you can do this in the firewall settings using ‘out-interface’, but that assumes the DSL connections are using different interfaces. In my case they use the same interface.

So the question boils down - how can I make the failover gateway never see my checking-ip address?

Any and all suggestions are appreciated. Note - I did look at the recursive routing idea, but I’d heard some folks had issues with this. Ideally I’d like to use something that is solid

2

Maybe you should check second gateway with arp-check?

3

There are a few ways to go about this, one way with your current setup that should be fast is to try and use routing rules. “/ip route rule”

There specify the dst-address of the service you want to ping over a given gateway and set the action to “lookup-only-in-table”. This assumes that you have a routing table setup for each gateway that is different than main.