Narbik’s Soup-to-Nuts Workbook RIPv2 Lab 1

"Lab 1 - Configuring RIPv2" starts off as a basic RIPv2 lab that involves 4 routers R1, R2, R3 and R4. R1 & R2 and R3 & R4 have a frame-relay point-to-point connections between them. R2 & R3 are connected via a switch.

To enable RIP, use the following commands beginning in global configuration mode:

Task 1 asks us to configure RIPv2 on all routers and advertise the directly connected networks including loopbacks.

Task 2 involves changing the update interval, invalidation timer, holddown timer and flush timers so that they are double the default valute.

Routing protocols use several timers that determine such variables as the frequency of routing updates, the length of time before a route becomes invalid, and other parameters. You can adjust these timers to tune routing protocol performance to better suit your internetwork needs. You can make the following timer adjustments: 

• The rate (time in seconds between updates) at which routing updates are sent

• The interval of time (in seconds) after which a route is declared invalid

• The interval (in seconds) during which routing information regarding better paths is suppressed

• The amount of time (in seconds) that must pass before a route is removed from the routing table

• The amount of time for which routing updates will be postponed

To adjust the timers, use the following command in router configuration mode:

 Task 3 is related to Flash update threshold which suppresses flash updates when the arrival of a regularly scheduled update matches, or is less than the number of seconds that is configured. The range is 0 to 30 seconds. In this we were told to suppress a flash update if the regular update is due in 10 seconds.

(config)#router rip
(config-router)#flash-update-threshold 10

I was not able to locate this on the docCD and ended up looking through the IOS help. Command was straight forward and it didn't take me more than 2 minutes to get this configured.  You can always verify your configuration using "show ip protocols".

Task 4 is about output-delay and input-queue size. If R1 is a high speed router and R2 is a low speed router then its easy for R1 to send updates at a quick pace but R2 is not fast enough to process those updates. So we can use "output-delay" command under rip process on R1 to introduce a delay between packets in a multipacket RIP update. We can also use "input-queue" on R2 to increase the queue size so updates are not lost while R2 processes them at a slow speed. Queue size can be 0-1024 with default value being 50. Larger the value, larger the depth of the queue.