On 9/29/2010 at 4:24 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@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.