Multiple gateways and administrative distance

RouterOS General
1

I have a MikroTik router that has two connections to the world: a 36Mbps link over a wireless connection, and a 1.5Mbps connection over a T1. I’d like to set up multiple default gateways with different administrative distances, so that it only sends traffic across the T1 if that wireless link goes down.

Here’s how I believe this should be set up:

/ip route add dst-address=0.0.0.0 net-mask=0.0.0.0 gateway=10.10.10.1
/ip route add dst-address=0.0.0.0 net-mask=0.0.0.0 gateway=192.168.0.1 distance=5

I didn’t see much documentation of redundant routes on the Mikrotik site. Does this look like it should work?

2

MT documentation covers this configuration.
See http://www.mikrotik.com/docs/ros/2.8/system/scripting.main.15.4

3

I know it can be set up with scripting (and that’s what I ended up using), but most commercial-grade routers support the ability to use “floating routes” with different administrative costs.

For example, I’ve got a Foundry router that I’ve got a static route set up on with a higher administrative cost, so that a certain route it knows through OSPF goes away, it can use that static route instead.

I’d like to make a feature request for this!

4

Of course, you can add routes with different distance. But in case of two static routes the router will use the route with higher distance only if the interface will change its status to down. This is not equal to destination unreachable state, when you obviously need to change defaul gateway, that’s why you need to use scripting (you can make failover link without scripting when you use serial, pptp, ppoe or l2tp interface to connect your router to a gateway).