RIP Justification

Fri Oct 1 14:16:23 UTC 2010

On 10/1/2010 4:21 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> The average home user cannot configure RIP. What is your point?
>
Last linksys I looked at had a checkbox. All done.

> RIP has no loop prevention and is suboptimal depending on the configuration
> that things get plugged in.
>

Damn. You mean the split horizon stuff doesn't prevent loops? Granted, 
it's not optimal, but it works better than nothing in small homeuser 
networks as we roll v6 out and will need plug and play routing inside of 
a house.

It's also, as someone else pointed out, nice for l3vpn when customers 
don't support BGP (ie, the very small ones). Providers hate manually 
having to jack with routes when customers want to rework stuff in their 
private networks.

> RIP breaks more often than DHCP in my experience.
>

I'm sure it does, but they are both useful for v6 in consumer grade 
routers where OSPF/IS-IS/BGP won't be found. These routers sometimes 
even get used in L3VPN. It's not the providers job to dictate what gear 
the customer wants to use. I rarely care about the stability of a 
customer network. I strictly care that my stuff works, it provides 
services to the customer, and the upkeep is as low as I can make it, 
especially for MPLS services.

Jack