In the next few posts, I will be exploring the concept of routing. Be advised that I am not a network engineer, nor do I have any experience working with actual networks. Like many of you, I am a student. These labs and posts are akin to one exploring a cave he visited a few times, and later returning to uncover additional hidden crevices. If anything, it’s going to be me talking into the void and hoping that a few people decide to listen.
So, what exactly are we trying to accomplish when we use routing protocols? What is routing? Let us try to think as simply and as clearly as we can about this topic, shall we? I want to get into a helicopter and look down on the forest without being distracted examining the individual trees. One device on a network wants to communicate and send data to another device. Duh. Very simple. Okay, but what is the most efficient way to get there?
You hop in your vehicle and Google a particular restaurant you want to eat at. What directions did your GPS recommend? It may have chosen a straight path, but that path may be a small rural road or crowded. The road around it, although a longer distance, may be faster because it’s via a highway or freeway. Is the highway congested with traffic? These variables we encounter in our everyday driving are very similar to how network engineers determine paths for network traffic and create protocols to reach different networks.
I’m going to be starting with a basic static route. This would be almost like the old days before GPS, where you wrote down the directions to a place and had a pre-planned set of instructions to go back and forth. Later, I will move to more complex but efficient dynamic routing protocols like RIP, EIGRP, and OSPF. I will then examine the problems these different protocols address and strive to make the underlying concepts as fundamental and straightforward as possible.
So, what exactly are we trying to accomplish when we use routing protocols? What is routing? Let us try to think as simply and as clearly as we can about this topic, shall we? I want to get into a helicopter and look down on the forest without being distracted examining the individual trees. One device on a network wants to communicate and send data to another device. Duh. Very simple. Okay, but what is the most efficient way to get there?
You hop in your vehicle and Google a particular restaurant you want to eat at. What directions did your GPS recommend? It may have chosen a straight path, but that path may be a small rural road or crowded. The road around it, although a longer distance, may be faster because it’s via a highway or freeway. Is the highway congested with traffic? These variables we encounter in our everyday driving are very similar to how network engineers determine paths for network traffic and create protocols to reach different networks.
I’m going to be starting with a basic static route. This would be almost like the old days before GPS, where you wrote down the directions to a place and had a pre-planned set of instructions to go back and forth. Later, I will move to more complex but efficient dynamic routing protocols like RIP, EIGRP, and OSPF. I will then examine the problems these different protocols address and strive to make the underlying concepts as fundamental and straightforward as possible.