Going Active on a Route

The second branch in the local computation logic causes the EIGRP router to ask its neighbors about their current best route to a subnet, hoping to find an available, loop-free alternative route to that subnet. When no FS route is found, the EIGRP router goes active for the route. Going active is jargon for the process of changing a route’s status to active. Once the router is active, EIGRP multicasts Query messages to its neighbors, asking the neighbors if they have a vali..

RIP Convergence When Routing Updates Cease

When a router ceases to receive routing updates, RIP must wait for some timers to expire before it decides that routes previously learned from the now-silent router can be considered to be failed routes. To deal with such cases, RIP uses its Invalid, Flush, and Holddown timers to prevent loops. Coincidentally, RIP’s convergence time increases to several minutes as a result. Example 8-3 details just such a case, where R1 simply ceases to hear RIP updates from R3. (To create..

Multicast Forwarding Using Sparse Mode

A dense-mode routing protocol is useful when a multicast application is so popular that you need to deliver the group traffic to almost all the subnets of a network. However, if the group users are located on a few subnets, a dense-mode routing protocol will still flood the traffic in the entire internetwork, wasting bandwidth and resources of routers. In those cases, a sparse-mode routing protocol, such as PIM-SM, could be used to help reduce waste of network resources. The ..

Two Types of BPDUs

To this point, the chapter has referred to all BPDUs as a single type. Actually, there are two types of BPDUs: • Configuration BPDUs • Topology Change Notification (TCN) BPDUs Configuration BPDUs are originated by the Root Bridge and flow outward along the active paths that radiate away from the Root Bridge. Topology Change Notification BPDUs flow upstream (toward the Root Bridge) to alert the Root Bridge that the active topology has changed. The following se..

Redirecting ICMP with HSRP

In older IOS releases, when you enable HSRP on an interface, the router will automatically disable ICMP redirection. However, starting with IOS Version 12.1(3)T, Cisco has changed how ICMP redirection works with HSRP, and it is now enabled by default. You can explicitly enable ICMP redirects on HSRP-enabled interfaces with the following commands: Router2#configure terminal Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z. Router2(config)#interface FastEth..