The use of RIPng

[bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 02:36:45PM -0400, Jeff McAdams wrote:
> On 6/1/10 2:08 PM, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
> >On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 06:29:51PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> 
> >>Ok, let me spell it out.  If you're running a routing protocol on your
> >>end-user workstations, you're probably doing it wrong.  If you're running 
> >>a
> >>routing protocol on your routers, then it goes like this:
> 
> >	if you run a routing protocol on an end-station - you've turned it 
> >	into
> >	a router...  (much like what happens in some anycast clusters for 
> >	node
> >	failover)
> 
> Uhm, no.

	here we must part ways... sort of by definition, if there is
	a routing protocol running, its a router - granted (as you 
	point out below) it may not forward packets (dependent on 
	configuration options) but -understanding- the network topology
	past next-hop is a key attribute of routing.

	so other than defintional terms, i'm almost with you. :)

--bill

> 
> If you run a routing protocol on an end-station - you've given that 
> end-station a mechanism that it might learn what the network topology is 
> in the overall network, beyond just its default next-hop.  You *might* 
> let it be a router, depending on how that routing protocol is set up and 
> other configuration issues within the OS.  ( echo 0 > 
> /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward    pretty much makes a Linux box *not* be 
> an IPv4 router, regardless of what software is running on it (yeah, 
> yeah, unless you start getting into user-space routing and such))  You 
> might also give that end-station the ability to inject routes into that 
> network topology, which could, indeed, cause problems.
> 
> So, there are use cases where it could be beneficial for end-stations to 
> have knowledge of the overall network topology by running a routing 
> protocol.  There are also, almost certainly drawbacks.  I think it is 
> possible for reasonable people to disagree (including based on their 
> individual scenarios for use-case) on which is bigger, the benefits or 
> the drawbacks.
> 
> -- 
> Jeff McAdams
> jeffm at iglou.com