[jan-jaap]

IRIX also understands the RIP routing protocol and I could write about that if anyone is interested. Most people tend to have these boxes at home nowadays and home routers don't tend to support RIP whereas in the 90's when I worked on these boxes I used RIP a lot.

RIP doesn't do anything with link speeds, right?

Consider this: my SGI ethernet segment has systems with speeds ranging from 10Mb/s to gigabit. The FDDI segment is 100Mb/s. I have a router (a small Linux system) act as a router between ethernet and FDDI (which uses a larger ~4500bytes MTU so a simple bridge doesn't cut it).

FDDI was optional on SGI systems. These systems all have a 10Mb/s ethernet port as well. I do not wish to disable this ethernet interface because I can netboot from it.

The problem is that the fastest way to another system on the SGI ethernet system may well be via the FDDI segment even if the system has an interface in the ethernet segment.

Example (simplified):

Code:

Crimson
et0 : 192.168.10.10  -------------------------------------------------------------+           Origin
fddi: 192.168.11.11  ------------- 192.168.11.1 (FDDI router) 192.168.10.2 ---------------  192.168.10.20

In this case the fastest way from Crimson to Origin is via FDDI.

I think later routing protocols can deal with this, but nothing included in old IRIX will.

Alternatively, I could set up separate IP ranges for every speed grade (or at least for slower-than-FDDI) and send everything via router(s).

Thoughts?