[Sunhelp] Confused about routing.

[Kevin Stevens]

Salutations and felicitations of the day and season...

I'm somewhat confused about the way that routing is handled on my Sol8 
system.  This box acts as a home firewall, with an le0 interface on the 
public side, and an hme0 interface on the private network side.  Default 
gateway is the .254 address of the ISP upstream.  NAT is being performed by 
IPF.

Now, I have to have routing enabled to be able to send/receive from the 
private network.  However, I don't really need dynamic routing, since there 
are only three routes available (private network, public network, default 
gateway).  And I really would prefer not to be sending RIP broadcasts in any 
case - there's no point in distributing private network info, and I don't 
want it visible out there anyway.

I'm having trouble getting this set up the way I want it.
It's easy to go to a non-routed environment - I remove my gateways file, put 
in a defaultrouter file, touch /reconfigure, reboot, and voila.  In.routed 
doesn't start up, netstat shows default route, hosts on the private network 
can't reach the outside world.

It's easy to go to a dynamic routed environment - I remove my defaultrouter 
file, put in a gateways file with the default route in there (set as 
passive), touch /reconfigure, and reboot.  In.routed starts up, hosts can 
reach the outside world, and now I'm RIPping to both interfaces.

I guess my questions are:

Does in.routed need to be running to support a purely static routed 
environment, or is there a simpler way?

Shouldn't the "passive" keyword in the gateways file listing (below) prevent 
RIP broadcasts from that interface?  If so, to prevent them from the private 
interface would I need to add an explicit route in gateways or somewhere 
else?  If not, how do I turn RIP off?

(net 0.0.0.0 gateway xxx.xxx.xxx.254 metric 1 passive)

Is there a cleaner way to restart the networking after these config changes 
than a reboot?

Any thoughts, observations, or general comments appreciated.  Thanks!

KeS
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