If you have a large router, you may well cater for the needs of different people, who should be served differently. The routing policy database allows you to do this by having multiple sets of routing tables.
If you want to use this feature, make sure that your kernel is compiled with the "IP: advanced router" and "IP: policy routing" features.
When the kernel needs to make a routing decision, it finds out which table needs to be consulted. By default, there are three tables. The old 'route' tool modifies the main and local tables, as does the ip tool (by default).
The default rules:
[ahu@home ahu]$ ip rule list
0: from all lookup local
32766: from all lookup main
32767: from all lookup default
This lists the priority of all rules. We see that all rules apply to all
packets ('from all'). We've seen the 'main' table before, it's output by
ip route ls, but the 'local' and 'default' table are new.
If we want to do fancy things, we generate rules which point to different tables which allow us to override system wide routing rules.
For the exact semantics on what the kernel does when there are more matching rules, see Alexey's ip-cref documentation.
Let's take a real example once again, I have 2 (actually 3, about time I returned them) cable modems, connected to a Linux NAT ('masquerading') router. People living here pay me to use the internet. Suppose one of my house mates only visits hotmail and wants to pay less. This is fine with me, but you'll end up using the low-end cable modem.
The 'fast' cable modem is known as 212.64.94.251 and is an PPP link to 212.64.94.1. The 'slow' cable modem is known by various ip addresses, 212.64.78.148 in this example and is a link to 195.96.98.253.
The local table:
[ahu@home ahu]$ ip route list table local
broadcast 127.255.255.255 dev lo proto kernel scope link src 127.0.0.1
local 10.0.0.1 dev eth0 proto kernel scope host src 10.0.0.1
broadcast 10.0.0.0 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 10.0.0.1
local 212.64.94.251 dev ppp0 proto kernel scope host src 212.64.94.251
broadcast 10.255.255.255 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 10.0.0.1
broadcast 127.0.0.0 dev lo proto kernel scope link src 127.0.0.1
local 212.64.78.148 dev ppp2 proto kernel scope host src 212.64.78.148
local 127.0.0.1 dev lo proto kernel scope host src 127.0.0.1
local 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo proto kernel scope host src 127.0.0.1
Lots of obvious things, but things that need to specified somewhere. Well, here they are. The default table is empty.
Let's view the 'main' table:
[ahu@home ahu]$ ip route list table main
195.96.98.253 dev ppp2 proto kernel scope link src 212.64.78.148
212.64.94.1 dev ppp0 proto kernel scope link src 212.64.94.251
10.0.0.0/8 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 10.0.0.1
127.0.0.0/8 dev lo scope link
default via 212.64.94.1 dev ppp0
We now generate a new rule which we call 'John', for our hypothetical house mate. Although we can work with pure numbers, it's far easier if we add our tables to /etc/iproute2/rt_tables.
# echo 200 John >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tables
# ip rule add from 10.0.0.10 table John
# ip rule ls
0: from all lookup local
32765: from 10.0.0.10 lookup John
32766: from all lookup main
32767: from all lookup default
Now all that is left is to generate Johns table, and flush the route cache:
# ip route add default via 195.96.98.253 dev ppp2 table John
# ip route flush cache
And we are done. It is left as an exercise for the reader to implement this in ip-up.