Just another note for the record: Booting a kernel without the FreeS/WAN IPSec patches does not fix this either. The only other patches on this kernel (aside from Julian's - and the problem was there for a 2.2.19 kernel without those) are for ReiserFS - and I can't quite imagine file system code affecting routing code. Yet other people are using "nexthop" with 2.2.20 kernels just fine. If I really garble the syntax I can get an error message like "expecting nexthop or line end" - so the kernel as compiled is _aware_ of nexthop, it just won't accept the standard syntax for it. Yeesh! Whit