Internal vs External EIGRP

[mpannill]

What makes a route show up as an external eigrp route vs an internal eigrp route other than the obivious; distribution from another routing protocol or another AS? What triggers the external flag?

[mohammedmahmoud]

Hi,

External routes are routes learned via redistribution (either from another routing protocol or another AS), and i don't think that there exits another method to trigger the external flag.

HTH,

Mohammed Mahmoud.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Possibility a "circular" answer, but anything the routing protocol considers "external" to its inner workings probably is tagged external. By inner workings, I have in mind having knowledge of the topology and in conjunction some cost metric for that topology.

Something "external" often is information provided to a routing protocol that it couldn't calculate. Your example of redistribution meets this test.

Although you asked about EIGRP, OSPF is a more interesting example because it not only has different external types, but can even tag inter area routes different from "normal" intra area routes.

[sundar.palaniappan]

""distribution from another routing protocol or another AS? What triggers the external flag?""

Both. Redistribution from another AS and another protocol/process would cause the route to show up as an External EIGRP route.

HTH

Sundar

[mpannill]

Thanks everyone but I actually figured out what I was missing shortly after I posted this question. I was looking at a couple of route table entries that were showing up as external eigrp routes even though they were in the same AS. I completely missed the "redistribute connected" on one of the routers which explained the external flag.

Thanks,

Mike