Posts Tagged ‘routing table’

How to delete entries from routing table on Linux

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Every now and then I had to tamper routing tables in Linux and every time I had to do it I forgot how I did it last time so finally I decided to put it on my blog and find how I can delete from Linux routing table easier

Deleting a record from a wrong routing table on Linux is a piece of cake basicly, here is an example:

linux:~# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

Let’s say this is the routing table and it’s incorrect as the routing through the node 169.254.0.0 should not be there.
Here is how the routing through 169.254.0.0 can be deleted:

linux:~# /sbin/route del -net 169.254.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0

Now here is the difference after deletion:

linux:~# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

If you want to delete the default gateway just use 0.0.0.0, e.g. -net 0.0.0.0 .. in above cmd example.
This would delete default gateway record from routing table which by the way in routing tables is marked with the UG flag.
Cheers 😉