Chapter 7 - Advanced Routing Configuration

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the applications of routing protocols. Many organizations have simply not taken the opportunity to implement dynamic routing within their environment. They claim that dynamic routing protocols are insecure by default, or they simply do not have the understanding for such an implementation. In many cases, there is no need to enable dynamic routing on the firewall, but if the need arises, the Nokia IPSO operating system happens to support quite a few of them, including Routing Information Protocol (RIP), open shortest path first (OSPF), and border gateway protocol (BGP). RIP is an interior gateway protocol that utilizes distance vectors to calculate the most effective path to a destination. RIPv2 is recommended over RIPv1, unless the environment needs to support legacy equipment that simply does not support RIPv2. RIP is relatively simple to configure and implement in any network, but time and understanding of the protocol is essential to a successful deployment. OSPF is another interior gateway protocol that utilizes link state to determine the best path to a destination. OSPF is by far the most popular dynamic routing protocol that overcomes many of the limitations of RIP, such as the ability to support variable length subnet masking. The deployment of OSPF should not be taken lightly since a simple configuration issue can cause serious issues. Unlike RIP and OSPF, BGP is an exterior gateway protocol that uses a patch vector protocol to calculate the best path to the destination.