Re: What's the good word?

[Anil Rijsinghani <[e-mail]>]

    Some comments on the two RIP-2 documents.  I have not monitored
    this list on a regular basis, so some of these may be due to
    a lack of background:

    1) The description of the "Routing Domain" and "Subnet Mask" sections
       are rather sketchy.  A clearer explanation of "RIP clouds" (and
       why they are needed), "subsumption", etc would be very helpful.

    2) The "Multicasting" section doesn't explain why IGMP (IP multicast)
       is a requirement.  This question, which was brought up on the
       list a couple of weeks back, drew some responses on
       why IP rather than hardware multicast is needed which left
       me somewhat confused.

       One school of thought held that since RIP packets are exchanged
       at the IP level, hardware addresses should not be mentioned.
       This (in my opinion) doesn't seem to be a sufficient reason to
       require yet another protocol - you want to make it easy for
       RIP-1 to be upgraded.  Another view said that it helped in ignoring
       certain messages, but it seems to me that there are other fields
       that can be used in the new format to achieve this, if it is
       indeed a requirement..

    Anil