(This is a REALLY old post that never got finished because for the most part the research never was complete. I finish it now because I feel that the answers are, for the most part, readily available and the topic is not complete speculation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
-ORIGINAL POST IDEA-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019d always kind of wondered about a few things about EIGRP:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, for number #1: since my original interest in this issue, Cisco actually has opened up EIGRP. See also http:\/\/blogs.cisco.com\/getyourbuildon\/cisco-opens-up-eigrp\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My speculation about #2, and why I think that it will work on Cisco and not others \u201cout of the box\u201d is that it is integrated into the fowarding engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
-NOWADAYS-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is my after-the-fact breakdown:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In early 2009 I had a load of time on my hands as I was unemployed, and didn\u2019t want to go outside until it was warm again. I had the money to do so, so it wasn\u2019t a problem. In the meantime, I was studying a bunch of Cisco stuff so that I would be all set to get a job when Chicago thawed. During this study, I noodled around with all of the protocols in the CCNP book I had on hand in order to be ready for any interview question someone threw at me. In labbing things up in GNS3, however, something occurred to me. OSPF and IS-IS were amazing protocols that EVERYONE used. EIGRP was also really amazing, but no one could use it because it was Cisco only. What a downer if you\u2019re an all Cisco network running EIGRP and all of a sudden you want to introduce a really cool device that isn\u2019t made by Cisco! So I started digging in to what made EIGRP so special. There were a bunch of oddities that I more or less sorted out with packet sniffing. One was the fact that the header described in most books depicts a 24 bit field for the subnet. Sounds fishy, right? What if I have a \/29? Well\u2026 packet capture revealed that it actually changes that header field dynamically based on need. Neat. I guess. Anyway, the big thing was STILL the fact that EIGRP was the only protocol that could do unequal-cost load balancing. How odd. Though it is kind of a dumb idea in most circumstances, I can see that there are some edge cases that maybe you want to do something like this. Though\u2026 really, if it comes down to that, it is probably still not a good idea. It is a neat academic idea, though not a good (in any way) production one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New shit has come to light, man. http:\/\/www.cisco.com\/c\/en\/us\/support\/docs\/ip\/enhanced-interior-gateway-routing-protocol-eigrp\/13677-19.html<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So it appears that I was right about CEF being key in the whole thing. Maybe that is a no brainer, but I give myself at least a little bit of credit for thinking through that part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, hopefully we can see some quality EIGRP implementations elsewhere, but with the advent of SDN, I\u2019m not 100% certain who will care about a non-programmable routing protocol at this point. We\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(This is a REALLY old post that never got finished because for the most part the research never was complete. I finish it now because I feel that the answers are, for the most part, readily available and the topic is not complete speculation.) -ORIGINAL POST IDEA- I\u2019d always kind of wondered about a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20,"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/n0c.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}