Configuring RIP RIP Overview
OmniSwitch AOS Release 7 Network Configuration Guide June 2013 page 19-5
RIP Version 2
RIP version 2 (RIPv2) adds additional capabilities to RIP. Not all RIPv2 enhancements are compatible
with RIPv1. To avoid supplying information to RIPv1 routes that could be misinterpreted, RIPv2 can only
use non-compatible features when its packets are multicast. Multicast is not supported by RIPv1. On inter-
faces that are not compatible with IP multicast, the RIPv1-compatible packets used do not contain poten-
tially confusing information. RIPv2 enhancements are listed below.
• Next Hop—RIPv2 can advertise a next hop other than the switch supplying the routing update. This
capability is useful when advertising a static route to a silent switch not using RIP, since packets pass-
ing through the silent switch do not have to cross the network twice.
• Network Mask—RIPv1 assumes that all subnetworks of a given network have the same network mask.
It uses this assumption to calculate the network masks for all routes received. This assumption prevents
subnets with different netmasks from being included in RIP packets. RIPv2 adds the ability to specify
the network mask with each network in a packet. Because RIPv1 switches ignore the network mask in
RIPv2 packets, their calculation of the network mask could possibly be wrong. For this reason, RIPv1-
compatible RIPv2 packets cannot contain networks that would be misinterpreted by RIPv1. These
networks must only be provided in native RIPv2 packets that are multicast.
• Authentication—RIPv2 packets can contain an authentication key that can be used to verify the valid-
ity of the supplied routing data. Authentication can be used in RIPv1-compatible RIPv2 packets, but
RIPv1 switches ignore authentication information. Authentication is a simple password in which an
authentication key of up to 16 characters is included in the packet. If this key does not match the
configured authentication key, the packet is discarded. For more information on RIP authentication, see
“RIP Security” on page 19-18.
• IP Multicast—IP Multicast Switching (IPMS) is a one-to-many communication technique employed by
emerging applications such as video distribution, news feeds, netcasting, and resource discovery.
Unlike unicast, which sends one packet per destination, multicast sends one packet to all devices in any
subnetwork that has at least one device requesting the multicast traffic. For more information on IPMS,
see Chapter 24, “Configuring IP Multicast Switching.”
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