
Running the below command will usually fix this. To solve this, we need to flush it before we issue an ifup/ifdown or a network restart.

This is because of some sort of mismatch in the caching the OS uses for the active network connections. In the above error, the network interface is eth0 If we try to add like above and restart the interface using ifup/ifdown or service restart, it will show errors like as below In fact, we cannot have same default gateway on different interface or more than one gateway in one interface.


Point to note is that we can’t have more than one gateway in the network interfaces. RTNETLINK answers: File exists error happens often when we edit the network interface file with a new IP / gateway and try to bring back the interface online.
