Setup guide

Notes
Example
Application Examples
Standard Policy-Routing Setup
General Information
Summary
The following manual surveys the IP routes management, equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing
technique, and policy-based routing, which gives the opportunity to select routes in order to restrict
the use of network resources to certain classes of customers.
Specifications
Packages required: system
License required: level1
ip route, /ip policy-routing
Standards and Technologies: IP (RFC 791)
Hardware usage: Not significant
Related Documents
• Package Management
• IP Addresses and ARP
• Firewall Filters
• Network Address Translation
Description
Wandy RouterOS has following types of routes:
• Connected Routes are created automatically when adding address to an interface. These
routes specify networks, which can be accessed directly through the interface.
• Static routes are user-defined routes that specify the router that can forward traffic to the
specified network. They are useful for specifying the default gateway.
You do not need to add routes to networks directly connected to the router, since they are added
automatically when adding the IP addresses. However, unless you use some routing protocol (RIP
or OSPF), you may want to specify static routes to specific networks, or the default route.
More than one gateway for one destination network may be used. This approach is called
'Equal-Cost Multi-Path Routing' and is used for load balancing (Note that this does not provide
failover). With ECMP, a router potentially has several available next hops towards any given
destination. A new gateway is chosen for each new source/destination IP pair. This means that, for
example, one FTP connection will use only one link, but new connection to a different server will
use other link. This also means that routes to often-used sites will always be over the same provider.
But on big backbones this should distribute traffic fine. Also this has another good feature - single
connection packets do not get reordered and therefore do not kill TCP performance.
Equal cost multipath routes can be created by routing protocols (RIP or OSPF), or adding a static