catch-22 with link-balancer?

Dear all,

first post to the list so let me take one sec to thank you all for the
incredible work, I looked at a dozen fw OSS solutions and firehol was by
far the cleanest and most immediate to use, great work!

# My setup
I'm setting up a firewall with 2 uplinks that are both modems connected to
my firewall through ethernet (ie no ppp devices). I then have one interface
connected to the lan. By default I bring up all interfaces with static ips
and no routes, which I intended link-balancer to manage for me. Also,
because the gws are modems I connect to through ethernet, the modem's lan
interface may be up but the internet still down, so the default ping of the
gw is not a good indicator the uplink works.

gw-eth1: 192.168.1.1/24
gw-eth2: 192.168.2.1/24
fw-eth1: 192.168.1.2/24
fw-eth2: 192.168.2.2/24
fw-eth3: 192.168.3.1/24

# The problem: race condition with ping check
Like I said pinging the modems on their lan's interface is of no use so I
setup link-balancer to ping 8.8.8.8. However because I have no default
routes to being with, that fails and so the routing table are never setup.

Does that make sense? If I change the check section to use the ip of the
gws everything is fine, but that's not good. If I use G's dns ips then
routes are not set up.

Is this a catch-22? is there a known solution that I'm missing? I guess I
could set up a default route in main using one of the two lines to start
with, but if the server was rebooted when one line is down and the
interface order is that the the default route is set to the link that does
not work, then firehol would still fail for the same reason.

It would be ideal, and possible more correct, that link-balancer could
handle an initial state with no routes and figure out the whole thing based
on its config (which it has enough info to do I reckon).

thank you,

Spike
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