Raskas’ blog

Ever noticed there exists a route for the 168.254.0.0 network in your route table?

[root@raskas ~]# route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.0.0.0        *               255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 eth0
169.254.0.0     *               255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 eth0
default         gw              0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

This is the network used by windows when there is no dhcp server available. Technologies behind this are Zeroconf (Zero Configuration Networking) and APIPA (Automatic Private IP Addressing).

But on a linux server, or even desktop, we don’t want to see that route.

We can manually remove this route by

[root@raskas ~]# route del -net 169.254.0.0/16

but after a network reboot the route will be back.

The route can be permanently removed by adding following line in /etc/sysconfig/network

NOZEROCONF=yes

note: tested on redhat based distros

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 15:04 and is filed under Linux SysAdmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.