NetID set as the Gateway for a route

Question

After establishing a pptp VPN connection I checked out the routing table and found out that there are two default routes first one defined on the eth0 interface and the other on defined on ppp0 ... While the first one having the right Gateway (192.168.1.1) the seccond one which is relate to the VPN connection has a NetID (10.0.10.0 ) set as its gateway !! Could someone please explain that to me...shouldn't a gateway be a specific point ?! Ohhh another question: how does my computer get not confused while having two default routes ?

Answer 1

the seccond one which is relate to the VPN connection has a NetID (10.0.10.0 ) set as its gateway !! Could someone please explain that to me...shouldn't a gateway be a specific point ?!

10.0.10.0 can be a valid host address, depending on the subnet mask.

For example, if the network was 10.0.0.0/8, 10.0.0.0/16, or similar, then only 10.0.0.0 would be the network address, and everything else including 10.0.10.0 would be an ordinary host address.

Ohhh another question: how does my computer get not confused while having two default routes ?

All routes in your routing table should have a metric assigned by your software, indicating the cost of that route. If you have two routes for identical networks (0.0.0.0/0, for example), the route with smaller metric wins.