RIP Justification

Thu Sep 30 00:11:55 UTC 2010

>>> On 9/29/2010 at  4:24 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
>> > where the RIP protocol is useful? Please excuse me if this is the =
>> incorrect
>> > forum for such questions.
>> 
>> RIP has one property no "modern" protocol has.  It works on simplex =
>> links (e.g. high-speed satellite downlink with low-speed terrestrial =
>> uplink).
>> 
>> Is that useful?  I don't know, but it is still a fact.
> 
> I once had cause to write a RIP broadcast daemon while on-site with a
> client; they had some specific brokenness with a Novell server and some
> other gear that was "fixed" by a UNIX box, a C compiler, and maybe 20
> or 30 minutes of programming (mostly to remember the grimy specifics of
> UDP broadcast programming).  I do not recall the specific routing issue,
> but being able to just inject a periodic "spoofed" packet was sufficient
> to repair them.

I've got a RIPv2 daemon written in a few dozen lines of Perl
to do something very similar.

In other situations, RIPv2 has strong KISS appeal.