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RIP

  

Description

One of the most widely used interior gateway protocols is the Routing Information Protocol (RIP). RIP is an implementation of a distance-vector, or Bellman-Ford routing protocol for local networks. It classifies routers as active and passive (silent). Active routers advertise their routes (reachability information) to others; passive routers listen and update their routes based on advertisements, but do not advertise. Typically, routers run RIP in active mode, while hosts use passive mode.

A router running RIP in active mode broadcasts updates at set intervals. Each update contains paired values where each pair consists of an IP network address and an integer distance to that network. RIP uses a hop count metric to measure the distance to a destination. In the RIP metric, a router advertises directly connected networks at a metric of 1. Networks which are reachable through one other gateway are two hops etc. Thus, the number of hops or hop count along a path from a given source to a given destination refers to the number of gateways that a datagram would encounter along that path. Using hop counts to calculate shortest paths does not always produce optimal results. For example, a path with hop count 3 that crosses three Ethernets may be substantially faster that a path with a hop count 2 that crosses two slow-speed serial lines. To compensate for differences in technology many routers advertise artificially high hop counts for slow links.

As delivered with most UNIX systems, RIP is run by the routing daemon, routed (pronounced route-"d"). A RIP routing daemon dynamically builds on information received through RIP updates. When started up, it issues a REQUEST for routing information and then listens for responses to the request. If a system configured to supply RIP hears the request, it responds with a RESPONSE packet based on information in its routing database. The RESPONSE packet contains destination network addresses and the routing metric for each destination.

When a RIP RESPONSE packet is received, the routing daemon takes the information and rebuilds the routing database adding new routes and "better" (lower metric) routes to destinations already listed in the database. RIP also deletes routes from the database if the next router to that destination says the route contains more than 15 hops, or if the route is deleted. All routes through a gateway are deleted if no updates are received from that gateway for a specified time period. In general, routing updates are issued every 30 seconds. In many implementations, if a gateway is not heard from for 180 seconds, all routes from that gateway are deleted from the routing database. This 180 second interval also applies to deletion of specific routes.

RIP version 2 (more commonly known as RIP II) add additional capabilities to RIP. Some of these capabilities are compatible with RIP I and some are not. To avoid supplying information to RIP I routes that could be mis-interpreted, RIP II can only use non-compatible features when its packets are multicast. On interfaces that are not capable of IP multicast, RIP I compatible packets are used that do not contain potentially confusing information.

Some of the most notable RIP II enhancements are:

Next hop
  The primary ones are the ability to advertise a next hop to use other than the router supplying the routing update. This is quite useful when advertising a static route to a dumb router that does not run RIP as it avoids having packets destined through the dumb router from having to cross a network twice.

RIP I routers will ignore next hop information in RIP II packets. This may result in packets crossing a network twice, which is exactly what happens with RIP I. So this information is provided in RIP I compatible RIP II packets.

Network Mask
  RIP I assumes that all subnetworks of a given network have the same network mask. It uses this assumption to calculate the network masks for all routes received. This assumption prevents subnets with different netmasks from being included in RIP packets. RIP II adds the ability to explicitly specify the network mask with each network in a packet.

While RIP I routers will ignore the network mask in RIP II packets, their calculation of the network mask will quite possibly be wrong. For this reason, RIP I compatible RIP II packets must not contain networks that would be mis-interpreted. These network must only be provided in native RIP II packets that are multicast.

Authentication
  RIP II packets may also contain one of two types of authentication string that may be used to verify the validity of the supplied routing data. Authentication may be used in RIP I compatible RIP II packets, but be aware that RIP I routers will ignore it.

The first method is a simple password in which an authentication key of up to 16 characters is included in the packet. If this does not match what is expected, the packet will be discarded. This method provides very little security as it is possible to learn the authentication key by watching RIP packets.

The second method is still experimental and may change in incompatible ways in future releases. This method uses the MD5 algorithm to create a crypto-checksum of a RIP packet and an authentication key of up to 16 characters. The transmitted packet does not contain the authentication key itself, instead it contains a crypto-checksum, called the digest. The receiving router will perform a calculation using the correct authentication key and discard the packet if the digest does not match. In addition, a sequence number is maintained to prevent the replay of older packets. This method provides a much stronger assurance that routing data originated from a router with a valid authentication key.

Two authentication methods can be specified per interface. Packets are always sent using the primary method, but received packets are checked with both the primary and secondary methods before being discarded. In addition, a separate authentication key is used for non-router queries.

RIP-I and network masks

RIP-I derives the network mask of received networks and hosts from the network mask of the interface via which the packet was received. If a received network or host is on the same natural network as the interface over which it was received and that network is subnetted (the specified mask is more specific than the natural netmask), the subnet mask is applied to the destination. If bits outside the mask are set it is assumed to be a host, otherwise it is assumed to be a subnet.

On point-to-point interfaces, the netmask is applied to the remote address. The netmask on these interfaces is ignored if it matches the natural network of the remote address or is all ones.

Unlike in previous releases, the zero subnet mask (a network that matches the natural network of the interface, but has a more specific, or longer, network mask) is ignored. If this is not desirable, a route filter may be used to reject it.

The RIP Statement

rip yes | no | on | off [ { broadcast ; nobroadcast ; nocheckzero ; preference preference ; defaultmetric metric ; query authentication [ none | [[ simple| md5] password]] ; interface interface_list [ noripin] | [ ripin] [ noripout] | [ ripout] [ metricin metric] [ metricout metric] [ version 1]|[ version 2 [ multicast| broadcast]] [[ secondary] authentication [ none | [[ simple| md5] password]] ; trustedgateways gateway_list ; sourcegateways gateway_list ; traceoptions trace_options ; } ] ;

The rip statement enables or disables RIP. If the rip statement is not specified the default is rip on ;. If enabled, RIP will assume nobroadcast when there is only one interface and broadcast when there is more than one.

The options are as follows:

Tracing options

The policy option logs info whenever a new route is announce, the metric being announced changes or a route goes or leaves holddown.

Packet tracing options (which may be modified with detail, send or recv):

packets
All RIP packets.

request
RIP information request packets, such as REQUEST, POLL and POLLENTRY

response
RIP RESPONSE packets, which is the type of packet that actually contains routing information.

other
Any other type of packet. The only valid ones are TRACE_ON and TRACE_OFF both of which are ignored.



next up previous contents index
Next: HELLO Up: Configuration Guide Previous: Definition Statements



Laurent Joncheray
Wed Jun 12 15:35:22 EDT 1996