Hello all..
I was messing 'round on amazon (reading all the book exerpts :P) and in a cisco book I found some stuff about EIGRP routing protocal. What I read about it, it sounded really good, like had all the benifits of OSPF and uses less CPU power, and easier to setup etc.
So, I was just curious, is anybody in NZ using EIGRP? Oh, and I'm a stupid newbie, so I'm sorry if the next few questions are kind silly, but, I guess everybody has gotta start somewhere.. :P
I've only worked with cisco 2500's, so this may be totally off for the newer routers, but...
When configuring the 2503 and 2514 with IOS 12.0, it seems that the only protocals it, "likes" is RIP and IGRP, say if I wanted to use EIGRP is it just a matter of saying somthing like "ip EIGRP" on the interfaces, or do you have to do somthing like upgrade to an IOS with EIGRP included?
Also I was wondering, say I had a mid sized network, and I decided that I wanted to use, EIGRP protocal on my network. But, say, I was getting internet delivered over frame relay, and that service provider was using, say RIP. Would that work? Or do you need to do somthing special to the routers to allow somthing like that, data moving between routing protocals??
Thanks
Malcolm
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I thought that I'd keep quiet on this one for a few days and see what other people had to say. I didn't want to wade in there and start another multi-million post thread. But it seams like everyone is being pretty level-headed about it, so here goes. I'm going to try REALLY hard in this post to give things to you straight. I'm not going to hide things, and thats going to make flaming me easy, so be gentle. The first thing I'm not going to hide is that I don't really have an expert knowledge of EIGRP. Sure I've used it in networks, and I've done stuff with it in Cisco courses, but I don't know the insides of it as well as people like James etc. There are a couple of reasons for this and I think it also hints at one of the weaknesses of the protocol. The main reason is that I primarily work on huge multivendor networks. And none of these seam to use EIGRP. The other reason that I don't have an expert knowledge in it, is that it seams to me to be very much like Microsoft Windows in it's operation. You turn it on, and hope that it works. If it works then you're fine. If not then well you have a problem. Anyway, probably the largest observation that I have with regard to EIGRP, is that I would never deploy it in a network because of the following reasons. 1) It would lock me into a single vendor. Most if not all of the major service provider networks require the possibility of a multivendor environment. This reduces the risk of catastrophic failure due to a bug in one vendors codebase. 2) No matter how many Cisco certified engineers there are out there, OSPF and ISIS are better understood protocols. If I am hiring staff, then I am far more likely to find ones that have an EXPERT, DETAILED knowledge of OSPF and ISIS than EIGRP. 3) I have seen large networks have scaling problems with EIGRP and have to replace it with a different protocol. This alone would sway me. There is no way that I would design a network in a way that it would have to be rebuilt at a later date. I guess though that main point comming out in all the posts on this thread is that which routing protocol you run is really the same as asking whick editor people write emails in. And as long as you can justify to yourself which protocol you choose than that's fine. I would suggest however that you try and have a play with the protocols. Not enough people take this chance seriously. Anyone thinking of buying networking equipment or redesigning their network (esp in a way that would lock them to a vendor) should demand to see that the solution works as described. Tell the vendor to set it up and show you. It then gives you a chance to see the setup for yourself and gain some more familiarity with the product/solution. And lets you see that the solution will/won't work on day one. Vendors should have demo equipment and labs availible for this. If you don't ask them to prove stuff then you're not making them work hard enough. I'll finish by saying that while I've demonstrated my meager knowledge of EIGRP, if anyone has any specific questions about OSPF,ISIS,BGP,RIP then feel free to ask me off list. Bring it on. =) Dean On Sat, Mar 02, 2002 at 07:47:22PM +1300, Malcolm Lockyer wrote: - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog