Review of Interior Gateway Protocols and Exterior Gateway Protocols

The world of TCP/IP is both logical and a little bit magical. Logical in the way that it adheres to well-defined inflexible rules; Class A IP addressing schemes use a default mask of 255.0.0.0; Layer 3 addresses are thirty-two bits in length subdivided into four octets containing eight bits each. Without routing protocols, packets don’t reach their final destination. The routing of packets through a network infrastructure is where the magical part comes into play.

Because packets have both a source and destination address, it would seem that with appropriately intelligent routers factored into the mix, packets could find their way without much assistance through a network. This ...

Get OSPF Network Design Solutions, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.