I am trying to learn how the Linux kernel does dynamic routing. My Network is currently setup with RIP V2. From what I can tell from route and ip route, I still only have static routes. I have 2 Cisco Routers on my network. I have created a new subnet on this Linux box, and I have created a static route to this new subnet only available through this Linux server's eth2 port.

Now how do I activate RIPv2 on Linux so it will advertise the route?

Will "IP route" or "route" display learned RIP routes once I succeed?

Thanks,
Steve

ps: I know networking, I'm a CCNA. But linux networking I'm learning.

Do you have a program running that will advertise/receive rip routes? If not, a quick search for "linux routing software" shows some possibilities

I'm not sure what you mean, the Software I'm running is Slackware GNU/Linux. I'm not asking about any third party stuff.

I'm asking about Dynamic Kernel routing. When I searched "Linux Kernel Dynamic Rout" and variations of RIPv2, ISIS, OSPF, IGRP, etc, I found nothing. All I could find was Routed, and some obsolete stuff like Zebra, Gated, and a third party Cisco clone Zebra/Guaga. But nothing native Linux Kernel based. I also found some online books, a Policy Routing how-to, and the Networking How-to online. Again, all I could find were references to either static routing or to the daemon routed. But those books were created over 10 years ago, and near as I can tell, routed only supports RIPv1, which is considered deprecated, since it is based on classful routing, which is also deprecated.

I suppose for those who don't know, dynamic routing is to routing what DHCP is to IP addressing. Automated versus manual.

Correct me if i'm wrong but shouldn't adding a subnet wide route with ip route add work?

Or is there some other reason.

Great question. I appreciate the response. Short answer is yes, but what about 2 or more subnets?

(If you mean something more than a standard "route add network dev" statement, please explain.)

Lets say you are 1 or 2 routers behind the router that connects to your ISP.

subnet--[Me]---- subnet ----[router]---- subnet ----[router]---- subnet ---{Internet Cloud}

Lets say router at location Me wants to add a subnet to the existing network. A static route would require changes to all the routers with static ip route add commands. With Dynamic Routing, when you manually add that new subnet to the Me router, it would automatically "advertise" the new subnet to all the other routers. No additional work needed.

Or what if you have a retail store chain with 4 stores. Each store connects to two other stores, creating a network ring. Each store is a subnet. If a link between any two stores goes down, the route may need to automatically change to route around the break to transparently keep net connectivity up. Now this is more of a textbook example. And I realize you could resolve this issue using static routing and metrics, but I believe this would cause certain delays before the lower metric route times out and uses the next shortest route.

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I've continued to research this topic. I'm slowly coming to the realization that to do dynamic routing, I will need to add and install Quagga.

I did find I also needed to execute route add -net 224.0.0.0/4 dev (default devname) to even see any routing protocol messages. I can now see my system putting out ripv1 messages, and it receives back ripv2 responses.

And the Space Shuttle Hubble Mission is launching!