Thanks Joe! You just added a new term to my vocabulary! "Technical Correctness" I think I'm going to go out of my way now to use this in the office... =)
From: jgreco@ns.sol.net Subject: Re: RIP Justification To: patrick@ianai.net Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:24:59 -0500 CC: nanog@nanog.org
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.
While not the correct way to engineer a network, sometimes being able to bring a client's network back on-line in a crisis is more important than technical correctness. I feel reasonably certain that I would not have been able to cobble together a quick solution if they had been relying on OSPF, etc. A simple protocol can be a blessing. I concede it is more often a curse.
.... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.