Options Statements

Options statements allow specification of some global options. If used, options must appear before any other type of configuration statement in the gated.conf file.

The options statement syntax is:

    options
        [ nosend ]
        [ noresolv ]
	[ gendefault [ preference preference ] [ gateway gateway] ]
        [ syslog [ upto ] log_level ]
	[ mark time ]
        ;

gendefault [ preference preference ] [ gateway gateway]

When gendefault is enabled, when a BGP or EGP neighbor is up it causes the creation of a default route with the special protocol default. This can be disabled per BGP/EGP group with the nogendefault option. By default, this route has a preference of 20. This route is normally not installed in the kernel forwarding table, it is only present so it can be announced to other protocols. If a gateway is specified, the default route will be installed in the kernel forwarding table with a next hop of the listed gateway.

Note that the use of the more general generate default option is prefered to the use of this gendefault option. The gendefault option may go away in future releases. The the section on Route Aggregation for more information on the generate statement.

nosend

Do not send any packets. This option makes it possible to run GateD on a live network to test protocol interactions without actually participating in the routing protocols. The packet traces in the GateD log can be examined to verify that GateD is functioning properly. This is most useful for RIP and HELLO and possibly the SMUX SNMP interface. This option does not yet apply to BGP and is less than useful with EGP and OSPF.

noresolv

By default GateD will try to resolve symbolic names into IP addresses by using the gethostbyname() and getnetbyname() library calls. These calls usually use the Domain Name System (DNS) instead of the hosts local host and network tables. If there is insufficient routing information to send DNS queries, GateD will deadlock during startup. This option can be used to prevent these calls, symbolic names will result in configuration file errors.

syslog [ upto ] log_level

Controls the amount of data GateD logs via syslog on systems where setlogmask() is supported. The available logging levels and other terminology are as defined in the setlogmask(3) man page. The default is equivalent to syslog upto info.

mark time

Specifying this option causes gated to output a message to the trace log at the specified interval. This can be used as one method of determining if gated is still running.