RIP routes

[Cynthia2004]

I had a discussion with my co-workers and we had doubts with two questions

1. if a link if unplugged from a router port,

- will all the routes learned from that port be flushed immidiately from the routing table or

- will the router mark the metric as 16 and announce them, but the routes will still stay in the routing table untill they are actually timed out?

2. If two RIP routes have the same hop count and metric, what will the router use as a tie-breaker? Is it vender specific?

Thanks in advance for your kindly reply.

[Cynthia2004]

Why no one is answering? :( Someone help, please...

I did some thought myself, for the first question, I think the router will mark the directly connected subnet as "unreachable" and trigger an update immidiately, but for other routes learned from that port, it will wait for them to timeout in case they are reachable via other path.

Still don't have answer for the second question.

Could someone confirm?

[Richard Burts]

Cynthia

The answer to the second question is that if RIP has leaned two paths to a destination that is the same prefix and has the same metric (same number of hops) that there is no tie breaker. RIP will put both paths into the routing table and both paths will be used for forwarding traffic to that destination.

HTH

Rick

[Cynthia2004]

Thanks for the answer, Rick. But in that case does that mean RIP is doing load balancing? Or does it choose one route "randomly"?

[Richard Burts]

Cynthia

Yes it does mean that RIP is doing load balancing or load sharing. Both routes will be used.

HTH

Rick