Used in the context of a GRE tunnel to specify that the tunnel sends keepalive packets to determine if the tunnel endpoint is up. Packets are sent according to the interval specified in the seconds parameters, and resent according to the number of the retries parameter. Use no keepalive to disable keepalive packets.
If the tunnel’s destination interface fails to respond to a consecutive number of keepalive packets equal to the retries parameter, the tunnel informs the hosts, which send packets to the tunnel that the tunnel is down. It does so, even though the source interface continues to send keepalive packets.
Syntax
keepalive [seconds [retries]]
no keepalive
Parameters
Parameter
Description
Possible Values
Default Value
seconds
The rate at which keepalive packets are sent
0-32767
10
retries
The number of times that a device continues to send keepalive packets without a response before the interface becomes inactive
0-255
3
User level
read-write
Context
Interface: Tunnel (L2, L2-L3)
Example
To enable GRE tunnel keepalives, setting the rate to 10 seconds and retries to 3:
