Basic Question

[a.gooding]

can RIP perform load balancing?. i am going to have fibre link and a frame-link connected to a 3600 series router.they are currently using RIP. this site is central site and 16 remote sites connect back to it. do i have to use OSPF or igrp?

[Richard Burts]

Arvind

Yes RIP can and does perform load balancing. If RIP finds two (or more) equal metric paths to a destination it will put both routes into the routing table and traffic will balance over the paths.

Remember that the metric for RIP is hops, so it will evaluate whether two paths are equal metric by comparing how many hops to the destination on each link (fiber and frame relay).

HTH

Rick

[mohammedmahmoud]

Hi there,

Notice that there is a limitaion to the number of routes that RIP can load balance over:

Configuring Equal-Cost RIP Routes

To set the maximum number of routes that RIP can insert into the routing table., use the rip equal-cost command Enter a number from 1 to 15. The default is 1. For example:

(config)# rip equal-cost 4

To reset the number of routes to the default value of 1, enter:

(config)# no rip equal-cost

[a.gooding]

great, one of the engineers was having a discussion with me with respect to an IPT solution im doing and he was telling me that RIP doesnt do it and i have to redo all sites to use ospf. i checked and i saw that it can be done but obviously wasnt too sure hence the question.

thanks again and for future reference im gonna revise my link state and vector routing protocols so i wont have to ask this type of question again... :)