No, it works in practise --- it's useful and essential in many circumstances.
Specific to EIGRP yopu need to know one thing:
NEVER USE EIGRP! EVER!
Even if your network is all cisco, EIGRP has not been without it's problems in my experience --- I've several times replaces EIGRP with OSPF. I think EIGRP is often used because it's easier to configure if you don't know what your doing, and this is a double edged sword.
EIGRP is/was used in the IHUG, Xtra and Callplus networks. It's used by many people for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons (esp. in the case of Xtra) is that geographical call routing means that dial-ups with static IP addresses can come from anywhere on the network and convergence needs to happen fast, without causing undue CPU load due to SPF calculations. One of the reasons that EIGRP is faster to converge than OSPF is that it has two routes for any given prefix: Successor: The actual route that is used for sending packets, ie it is in the routing table. Plausable Successor: The next-best route, which will be injected into the routing table immediately after the successor is poisoned. I'm not saying that EIGRP is better than anything else, but it certainly has it's uses. It's great on routers that just arent as grunty as they used to be. Peter, Andrew, did you guys get rid of those poor old 7500's in the end? EIGRP also is very good at load balancing non-equal sized links, for example if you have a 2Mb FR and a 10Mb PVC from Wellington to Auckland then EIGRP is about the best way to make sure that both links get utilised in a sensible manner, short of manually routing certain prefixes down each one - which as I am sure you all know has it's drawbacks. This email has gone on much longer than I originally planned, however I wanted to point out that EIGRP, like OSPF has it's uses. Just don't ask me about ISIS or RIP. I almost had a heart attack when I started working at Callplus and they had RIP running in the core! Cheers. James Tyson. "Upgrade your grey matter, 'coz one day it may matter." - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog