RIP Justification

Fri Oct 1 18:10:18 UTC 2010

> Tim hit the nail on the head. Maintaining statics on a large network would become a huge problem. Human error will eventually occur. The network scenario I am speaking of is DSL/Cable type setups, where a customer could move from router to router(DSLAM/CMTS) due to capacity re-combines. Utilizing a dynamic routing protocol makes these types of changes easier to digest.

Just to be perfectly clear with the scenario I was referring to (L3VPN
with all remote sites hitting provider router) that Tim was responding
to.. The kit is all managed - customer has no access to it. I should
have mentioned that before, as it's a pretty key point to the example,
perhaps it was thought the customer could touch it?

What is needed is simply one step above statics so the provider does
not have to maintain them. Loops or hop count are a non-issue, and the
customer sites have no redundancy. It's not even a requirement to have
fast convergence.

All that is required is to have the CPE say 'here is 10.0.0/24', or at
a later date, '10.0.1/24' without any work on any other equipment.
Nice and easy. RIPv2.

Arguing that BGP should be used over RIPv2 in this scenario becomes
interesting, as BGP would offer no real advantages and requires
further configuration in most cases for each site deployed. It also
introduces more overhead for the carrier, the same with OSPF and
IS-IS.

In other scenarios - of course choose a different protocol - but for
this one, I think its a good example for the OP as to why RIPv2 is
still used.