Introduction to Redistribution

Hi,

I just wanted clarification. The reasno we have to have both of the routing protocols running on the router is because redistribution only will work the router is running both of those processes, in this case that is EIGRP and RIP. If it did not know one or the other it wouldn’t work because it happens only outbound and it needs to go in both directions. Am I understanding this correctly?

Hello Cameron.

You can redistribute either in one direction or in both directions, it doesn’t matter. The reason why the redistributing router needs to run both protocols is because if you tell it something like this

“Redistribute EIGRP routes into RIP”

  1. It needs to have EIGRP routes to redistribute. You cannot have EIGRP routes if you’re not running EIGRP
  2. It needs to have a RIP process enabled. You cannot redistribute EIGRP routes into RIP if you’re not running RIP in the first place. You need to have RIP enabled, you need to have RIP neighbors to advertise this to, and so on.

If anything is still unclear, please let me know.

David

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Hi David,

Thank you for the clear explanation I appreciate it and understand it better now.

Good luck with your ENCOR studies.

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Hello Cameron

@davidilles has got it correct. Remember, redistribution is defined as the transfer of routing information from one source to another. The sources of routing information can include:

  • directly connected routes
  • static routing configurations
  • dynamic routing protocols such as OSPF, EIGRP, RIP, IS-IS, BGP etc…

Note that the first two can only be sources of redistribution. You cannot redistribute routes into directly connected or static routes, it doesn’t make sense. But you can redistribute from directly connected and static routes, into dynamic routing protocols. And of course you can redistribute from one dynamic routing protocol into another.

So it only makes sense that the source and the destination of the redistribution be configured on the router, as David correctly states. Does that make sense?

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz