The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is one of the oldest distance-vector routing protocols, which uses the hop count as a routing metric. RIP avoids routing loops by employing a limit on the number of hops permitted in a path from the source to a destination. The maximum number of hops permitted for RIP is 15. A hop count of 16 is considered an infinite distance, in other words the route is considered unreachable. Despite this limitation, RIP works great for basic route communications between devices.
How RIP works
With RIP, a router sends its full routing table to all other connected routers every 30 seconds. Triggered updates can also occur if a router goes down before the 30-second timer has expired.
RIP performs "routing by rumor" and is more prone to loops than other routing protocols. That's because a RIP router sends its entire routing table to every other router. All other routers do the same, and because there's no real neighbor relationship or calculation of routes, the routers have little firsthand knowledge of available networks.
Setting up RIP
- Configuring RIP involves
- Enabling it on the router
- Declaring which of the directly connected networks should be advertised
- You can configure it using the following commands
router ripfrom the config terminal modeversion 2network <networkid>