Competition Success Review

 Competition Success Review

Competition Success Review  published this article page no 14 the textbook definition of administrative distance is simple enough: the measurement of a protocols believability. its not enough to know the definition however youve got to know when ad comes into the picture and when it does not. when a packet needs to be routed the router looks in its routing table for the next-hop ip address the packet should take to get to the destination. there may be more than one matching path in which case the router will look for the longest match. the route that has the longest match - the route with the most bits in the mask set to 1 - will be the route that is used. consider the following three routes from a fictional cisco router: i 172.17.0.0 /24 via 172.1.1.1 o 172.17.0.0 /25 via 173.1.1.1 r 172.17.0.0 /26 via 174.1.1.1 this router has three possible next-hop ip addresses that it can send packets destined for the network 172.17.0.0. the masks are of different lengths meaning that the route with the longest match (again the route with the most bits set to 1) will be used. in this example the rip route will be used since it has the longest match with a mask of /26. the administrative distances do not matter. ad does matter when the masks are the same length as shown here: i 172.17.0.0 /24 via 172.1.1.1 o 172.17.0.0 /24 via 173.1.1.1 r 172.17.0.0 /24 via 174.1.1.1 the longest match rule always precedes the use of ad but here there is a three-way tie regarding the masks. theyre all /24 (or 255.255.255.0 in dotted decimal). ad will be used to break this tie. as mentioned ad is a measurement of a protocols believability. it is important to keep in mind that the lowest ad will be preferred. and while the routing table will show you the ads of the respective protocols its a very good idea to know these ads before taking the ccna or ccnp: connected route: 0 static route: 1 eigrp summary: 5 external bgp: 20 eigrp (internal): 90 igrp: 100 ospf: 110 isis : 115 rip: 120 eigrp (external) : 170 unknown: 255 (a router will not believe a source with an ad of 255 and such routes will not be placed into the routing table.) the three protocols we looked at in the comparison were rip igrp and ospf. while your first instinct may be that the ospf route would be the most believable igrp actually has a lower ad than the other two and would be the route installed in the routing table. since igrp does not support variable-length subnet masking and ospf does you may never see this scenario outside of an exam question. but if you do see it in the exam room or in a production network youll understand how an igrp route could be preferred over an ospf route competition success review magazines subscription.

Competition Success Review