18.12. Routing traffic from a specific subnet to a different default gateway by using the network RHEL system role


You can use policy-based routing to configure a different default gateway for traffic from certain subnets. By using the network RHEL system role, you can automate the creation of the connection profiles, including routing tables and rules.

For example, you can configure RHEL as a router that, by default, routes all traffic to internet provider A using the default route. However, traffic received from the internal workstations subnet is routed to provider B. By using Ansible and the network RHEL system role, you can automate this process and remotely configure connection profiles on the hosts defined in a playbook.

This procedure assumes the following network topology:

Example topology used for policy-based routing.

Prerequisites

  • You have prepared the control node and the managed nodes.
  • You are logged in to the control node as a user who can run playbooks on the managed nodes.
  • The account you use to connect to the managed nodes has sudo permissions for these nodes.
  • The managed nodes use NetworkManager and the firewalld service.
  • The managed nodes you want to configure has four network interfaces:

    • The enp7s0 interface is connected to the network of provider A. The gateway IP in the provider’s network is 198.51.100.2, and the network uses a /30 network mask.
    • The enp1s0 interface is connected to the network of provider B. The gateway IP in the provider’s network is 192.0.2.2, and the network uses a /30 network mask.
    • The enp8s0 interface is connected to the 10.0.0.0/24 subnet with internal workstations.
    • The enp9s0 interface is connected to the 203.0.113.0/24 subnet with the company’s servers.
  • Hosts in the internal workstations subnet use 10.0.0.1 as the default gateway. In the procedure, you assign this IP address to the enp8s0 network interface of the router.
  • Hosts in the server subnet use 203.0.113.1 as the default gateway. In the procedure, you assign this IP address to the enp9s0 network interface of the router.

Procedure

  1. Create a playbook file, for example, ~/playbook.yml, with the following content:

    ---
    - name: Configuring policy-based routing
      hosts: managed-node-01.example.com
      tasks:
        - name: Routing traffic from a specific subnet to a different default gateway
          ansible.builtin.include_role:
            name: redhat.rhel_system_roles.network
          vars:
            network_connections:
              - name: Provider-A
                interface_name: enp7s0
                type: ethernet
                autoconnect: True
                ip:
                  address:
                    - 198.51.100.1/30
                  gateway4: 198.51.100.2
                  dns:
                    - 198.51.100.200
                state: up
                zone: external
    
              - name: Provider-B
                interface_name: enp1s0
                type: ethernet
                autoconnect: True
                ip:
                  address:
                    - 192.0.2.1/30
                  route:
                    - network: 0.0.0.0
                      prefix: 0
                      gateway: 192.0.2.2
                      table: 5000
                state: up
                zone: external
    
              - name: Internal-Workstations
                interface_name: enp8s0
                type: ethernet
                autoconnect: True
                ip:
                  address:
                    - 10.0.0.1/24
                  route:
                    - network: 10.0.0.0
                      prefix: 24
                      table: 5000
                  routing_rule:
                    - priority: 5
                      from: 10.0.0.0/24
                      table: 5000
                state: up
                zone: trusted
    
              - name: Servers
                interface_name: enp9s0
                type: ethernet
                autoconnect: True
                ip:
                  address:
                    - 203.0.113.1/24
                state: up
                zone: trusted

    For details about all variables used in the playbook, see the /usr/share/ansible/roles/rhel-system-roles.network/README.md file on the control node.

  2. Validate the playbook syntax:

    $ ansible-playbook --syntax-check ~/playbook.yml

    Note that this command only validates the syntax and does not protect against a wrong but valid configuration.

  3. Run the playbook:

    $ ansible-playbook ~/playbook.yml

Verification

  1. On a RHEL host in the internal workstation subnet:

    1. Install the traceroute package:

      # dnf install traceroute
    2. Use the traceroute utility to display the route to a host on the internet:

      # traceroute redhat.com
      traceroute to redhat.com (209.132.183.105), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
       1  _gateway (10.0.0.1)     0.337 ms  0.260 ms  0.223 ms
       2  192.0.2.1 (192.0.2.1)   0.884 ms  1.066 ms  1.248 ms
       ...

      The output of the command displays that the router sends packets over 192.0.2.1, which is the network of provider B.

  2. On a RHEL host in the server subnet:

    1. Install the traceroute package:

      # dnf install traceroute
    2. Use the traceroute utility to display the route to a host on the internet:

      # traceroute redhat.com
      traceroute to redhat.com (209.132.183.105), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
       1  _gateway (203.0.113.1)    2.179 ms  2.073 ms  1.944 ms
       2  198.51.100.2 (198.51.100.2)  1.868 ms  1.798 ms  1.549 ms
       ...

      The output of the command displays that the router sends packets over 198.51.100.2, which is the network of provider A.

  3. On the RHEL router that you configured using the RHEL system role:

    1. Display the rule list:

      # ip rule list
      0:      from all lookup local
      5:    from 10.0.0.0/24 lookup 5000
      32766:  from all lookup main
      32767:  from all lookup default

      By default, RHEL contains rules for the tables local, main, and default.

    2. Display the routes in table 5000:

      # ip route list table 5000
      default via 192.0.2.2 dev enp1s0 proto static metric 100
      10.0.0.0/24 dev enp8s0 proto static scope link src 192.0.2.1 metric 102
    3. Display the interfaces and firewall zones:

      # firewall-cmd --get-active-zones
      external
        interfaces: enp1s0 enp7s0
      trusted
        interfaces: enp8s0 enp9s0
    4. Verify that the external zone has masquerading enabled:

      # firewall-cmd --info-zone=external
      external (active)
        target: default
        icmp-block-inversion: no
        interfaces: enp1s0 enp7s0
        sources:
        services: ssh
        ports:
        protocols:
        masquerade: yes
        ...
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