TABLE OF CONTENTS Although static routes may work just fine for some networks, they do have their obvious drawbacks. In a large network with plenty of routes and frequent changes, static routing would be a nightmare to manage. Static routes also make it more burdensome to configure backup routes in case a link goes down. Network engineers quickly saw the drawbacks of this solution early on in the dawn of computer networking and scrambled to create a solution to alleviate the problem. One of the earliest routing protocols was the distance vector routing protocol RIP. Routers learn other routes from other routing peers, which share the state of the links with RIP. It has a very simple routing cost algorithm one hop per router that the traffic has to pass through. It does not take into account anything about the link speed, or custom metrics. Furthermore, many devices (including mainframes) have supported this protocol for a very long time, so it might make sense to implement it in your network.
On the original RIP specification there was no mechanism to authenticate the routing updates you received through RIP. That meant a hacker could plug in a rogue router, and begin advertising RIP updates into your routing domain. Hackers could do anything from causing a Denial-of-Service attack (by misrouting traffic) to routing traffic through their own machines to capture it and sniff the network. It is highly recommended you use RIP version 2 with MD5 password...
