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First of all, may I welcome you to my site. My name is Chris and I'm from the UK and work as a Systems Engineer for Cisco. This blog was initially created to post up my subnetting technique but has now got more stuff to do with attaining Cisco certifications. Either way I really hope that the content is sufficent for your needs and I look forward to hearing your feedback. If you find that the content really helps you please feel free to donate using the PayPal link on the right.
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"ip classless" versus "no ip classless"
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
This often has me confused but the article below, rejigged slightly from the original article here seems to have cleared the fog from my mind and hopefully yours too.
Where the ip classless configuration command falls within the routing and forwarding processes is often confusing. In reality, IP classless only affects the operation of the forwarding processes in IOS; it doesn't affect the way the routing table is built. If IP classless isn't configured (using the no ip classless command), the router won't forward packets to supernets. As an example, let's place three routes in a routing table and route packets through the router.
Note: If the supernet or default route is learned via IS-IS or OSPF, the no ip classless configuration command is ignored. In this case, packet switching behavior works as though ip classless were configured.
router# show ip route
....
172.30.0.0/16 is variably subnetted, 2 subnets, 2 masks
D 172.30.32.0/20 [90/4879540] via 10.1.1.2
D 172.30.32.0/24 [90/25789217] via 10.1.1.1
S* 0.0.0.0/0 [1/0] via 10.1.1.3
Remembering that the 172.30.32.0/24 network includes the addresses 172.30.32.0 through 172.30.32.255, and the 172.30.32.0/20 network includes the addresses 172.30.32.0 through 172.30.47.255, we can then try switching three packets through this routing table and see what the results are.
A packet destined to 172.30.32.1 is forwarded to 10.1.1.1, since this is the longest prefix match.
A packet destined to 172.30.33.1 is forwarded to 10.1.1.2, since this is the longest prefix match.
A packet destined to 192.168.10.1 is forwarded to 10.1.1.3; since this network doesn't exist in the routing table, this packet is forwarded to the default route.
A packet destined to 172.30.254.1 is dropped.
The surprising answer out of these four is the last packet, which is dropped. It's dropped because its destination, 172.30.254.1, is within a known major network, 172.30.0.0/16, but the router doesn't know about this particular subnet within that major network.
This is the essence of classful routing: If one part of a major network is known, but the subnet toward which the packet is destined within that major network is unknown, the packet is dropped.
The most confusing aspect of this rule is that the router only uses the default route if the destination major network doesn't exist in the routing table at all. However, if ip classless was configured the default route would have been used.
So there you have it. The fundamental difference between the configuration of ip classless and no ip classless is whether the default route would be used.
Posted byChris Bloomfield at 14:25 2 comments
Labels: Cisco, default route, ip classless, no ip classless
Summary Route to Null0 - Routing Loop Prevention
Why is that when we summarise networks we see a static summary route automatically generated to Null0?
Let's assume for a minute that we didn't have this static route automatically generated for us and consider the following example.
I have a router R1 that has subnets 192.168.1.0/24, 192.168.2.0/24, 192.168.3.0/24, 192.168.4.0/24, and 192.168.5.0/24 and I decide that R1 should advertise these routes in one summary route to its neighbour at R2 via R1s Serial0/0 interface. As I am using one summary route I could summarise them down to 192.168.0.0/21 which covers 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.7.255. I also have a default route configured on R1 which points all unmatched traffic out of Serial0/0 (ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Serial0/0).
Now let's say that R2 receives a packet destined for 192.168.6.1/24. It will look into its routing table and see that there is a route to 192.168.0.0/16 via R1 which is the summary route sent by R1. R2 forwards this packet to R1 and then what happens? R1 has entries for 192.168.1.0 - 192.168.5.0 in its routing table but no entry for 192.168.6.0/24. So then what does it do? Remember there is a default route configured on R1 pointing to R2 so it will forward the packet back to R2. R2 will look into its routing table and forward it back to R1 ad infinitum. What we have here is a routing loop.
This is why we have the automatically generated summary route to Null0. In our example above the IOS would have generated the following entry in our routing table:
192.168.0.0/21 is a summary, 00:00:05, Null0
Now there is a route for 192.168.6.0 to 192.168.7.255 which will go to Null0 (i.e. be dropped) instead of following the default route, and in this example, creating a routing loop. All of this could be avoided by not oversummarising.
Posted byChris Bloomfield at 13:48 3 comments
Labels: default route, Null0, static route, summary routes
