IP Routing

Summing Up

Why bother with RIP-2? RIP-2, after all, is still RIP. There are still the issues of convergence times and a maximum diameter of 15 hops. Routing updates are sent every 30 seconds and consume network resources. The metric does not account for link bandwidth or delay. These issues with RIP may loom large in your mind if you are building a network from scratch. You have the choice of other, newer routing protocols that do not present these headaches (although they do present other headaches). However, if you are building a small, homogenous network and are not too concerned about occasional convergence problems, RIP-2 may be ideal for you.

RIP-2 may also be a good choice if you are currently running RIP-1 and are happy with it. Maybe your network is small and likely to remain that way. Maybe the link types and speeds in your network are homogenous, so the issue of RIP metrics hasn’t bothered you. And maybe there aren’t so many paths between any pair of nodes that RIP gets lost during convergence. If you are happy with RIP-1, migrating to RIP-2 may be an excellent solution if you need VLSM, discontiguous address spaces, or authentication. You would still be dealing with RIP -- familiar, easy to configure, and reliable -- but would have the added benefits of Version 2.