Routing Information Protocol

Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a distance-vector routing protocol. Routers running the distance-vector protocol send all or a portion of their routing tables in routing-update messages to their neighbors.

You can use RIP to configure the hosts as part of a RIP network. This type of routing requires little maintenance and also automatically reconfigures routing tables when your network changes or network communication stops. RIPv2 was added to the System i® product so you can send and receive RIP packets to update routes throughout your network.

In the following figure, a static route is added to the central system (AS1) that describes the connection to the network 10.1.1.x by way of AS2. This is a static route (added by your network administrator) with route redistribution set to yes. This setting causes this route to be shared with other routers and systems so that when they have traffic for 10.1.1.x, they route the traffic to your central System i platform (AS1). AS2 has the routed system started so that it sends and receives RIP information. In this example, AS1 is sending the message that AS2 has a direct connection to 10.1.2.x.

Example of dynamic routing

The following process describes the routing of traffic in the preceding figure.