Dear Sir, Thank you for your response. The goal of my part of the project is to just setup routing using point-point eth links between 5 systems Static routes will suffice. I am looking at zebra becuase the static routes I created are not "working". I shall detail what I did and tell you the exact problems I faced: Each of the systems has 4 eth cards. and 3 of them are used in the network. the fourth one is just in case we need to connect it to a router later on.. So i conneated the eth cards with eth crossover cables via a patch panel for convenience.Pls corect me if I should have used striaght through cables Our project requires all the Ip addresses to one machine to be the same. I am using Redhat Linux 7.1 1. I assigned ip addresses to each interface when I loaded Linux itself. The Ip addresses are like 192.168.x.y/32 No broadcast address on any interface. Just the inet address. And no gateway or any other address. 2. I setup neighbours using "ip neigh add..." 3. Set up static routes using "ip route add ..." 4. But ping doesnt seem to work. in some cases I get "destination host unreachable" and most of the times there is no message, and I had to kill it (CTRL C.) 5. There is no other device like a switch or a hub connected to the network. Just the ethernet crossover cables between the systems via a patch panel for convenience. Is the problem becoz of the patch panel? 6. But when I connected a switch to the 4th eth card of each system, ping works just fine. but when i remove the switch the ping doesnt work and all packets are lost. Please let me know if you need any more details to answer my questions. Regards, Sanjeev. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com