RIP To Be Removed from SLAC

June 6, 2000

The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a protocol that a host can use to find internet routes; it is an old and not very efficient protocol, and it has been replaced long time ago in Wide Area Networks. In the LAN, some (usually old) machines used to run RIP instances to learn about the default gateway; this is the historical reason why SLAC supported RIP on its routers.

The supported way of defining a default gateway for a machine is not to rely on dynamic information (like RIP) and rather statically enter the IP address or name of that machine as default gateway; practically all of the SLAC-maintained computers are NOT running RIP anymore since a long time.

We have decided therefore to remove RIP support from our routers.

Will I be affected by this?

First of all, Windows machines are generally maintained by the Desktop group and do not run RIP, so they are not affected.

For Unix machines:

• If you are using a SLAC maintained system, you need not worry, as RIP is not running on those systems.
• If you are using a machine you maintain yourself (or you are not sure on who maintains your machine), you should not run RIP, and this is the case for the vast majority of systems; but you or someone else could have configured RIP a long time ago, for example. You can easily check if you are running RIP in the following way:
  • look for a process called gated or routed (using for example the ps command; remember to include all the processes on your system - the actual syntax for the ps command varies depending on the OS). If there is a process with such a name, chances are you running RIP.

In general, if you do run RIP, and if you do not have a statically defined default gateway (so you are actually using RIP to learn who the default gateway is), you will be affected by the RIP removal from the routers, in that you won't be able to connect outside your own subnet.

OK, I'm running RIP, what do I do now?

The right configuration is to have a statically defined default gateway, and not relying on RIP to learn about such a gateway. Therefore, if you run RIP, contact unix-admin@slac.stanford.edu to learn about the address of your gateway and manually define that gateway as your default gateway. Then, kill the routed or gated processes and remove them from your system startup scripts.

When will this happen?

We'll gradually remove RIP from the SLAC VLANs starting from July 3rd, 2000; we expect to have RIP removed completely by July 7th. Should you have any concerns or problems with internet connectivity that might be related to this operation, please send e-mail to net-admin@slac.stanford.edu.

Owner: Davide Salomoni