Configuring Rip - Novell NETWARE 6-DOCUMENTATION Manual

Configuring RIP

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Place Book Title Here
"Configuring Source Route Packet Forwarding" on page 82
"Configuring BOOTP Forwarding" on page 82
"Configuring EGP" on page 83
"Configuring Multiple Logical Interfaces" on page 84
"Configuring a Secondary IP Address" on page 86
RIP is probably the most common IP routing protocol in use. It is widely
available and presents few obstacles to interoperability with other IP
internetworks, most notably the Internet.
RIP performs sufficiently well in small IP internetworks that have simple
architectures and few routers. However, RIP reveals its limitations in the large,
complex internetworks that have become common in government and private-
sector organizations throughout the world. Its most apparent limitations are
the following:
All subnets must be contiguous
RIP routes are limited to 15 hops
To overcome or ease some of these limitations, the internetworking
community developed various enhancements to RIP. RIP II, for example, is an
enhanced version of RIP that supports variable-length subnet masks. It carries
a field that contains the subnet mask of the destination network. RIP II also
supports the use of subnet zero, whose addresses were reserved under the
original IP specification. When configuring RIP on your router, you can run
RIP I, RIP II, or both on a single interface.
NOTE:
Not all third-party routers support RIP II.
You can also enable poison reverse on an interface. This is a mechanism that
causes RIP to advertise a route back through the same path from which it
learned the route, but with a hop count of 16—that is, unreachable. Although
poison reverse prevents routing loops, the unreachable routes carried in each
RIP packet increase the bandwidth consumed by RIP traffic. This increase
becomes significant in large internetworks.
RIP enables you to assign a cost value between 1 and 15 to each network
interface you configure. This enables you to establish a preferred route
according to the type of network media connected to the interface. For