At 4:02 AM -0400 5/13/02, nrf wrote: >In-line > wrote in message >[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... >> Nokia might support it, but I have been (fairly reliably) told that Cisco >> will *not* be supporting IGRP as of one of the newest IOS releases. I >> can't find the announcement on CCO (if there is one), so take with a grain >> of salt, but a Cisco instructor was quite adamant about this last week. > >That makes sense, considering it's literally been years since I've actually >seen a bonafide production network running IGRP. So it makes sense that >Cisco is finally ditching this dead wood. > >But I'm not asking this question because I'm champing at the bit to install >a mixed Cisco/Nokia IGRP network. No, I'm asking because if it's true that >Nokia really does support IGRP, then that begs the question - what other >supposedly Cisco-proprietary technologies are like this too? I'm not >talking about situations like what Howard stated where Cisco actually has an >agreement to provide its technology to other vendors (somehow I doubt that >Cisco and Nokia have such an agreement), but I'm talking about full-blown >vendor compatibility between some other vendor and Cisco. For example, does >anybody know of another vendor that supports, say, EIGRP? Or CDP? Now you >might say that it would be impossible for another vendor to support these >technologies, but, hey, Nokia apparently somehow managed to support IGRP, so >why exactly couldn't somebody else support, say, EIGRP? >
I'd be very surprised if another vendor simply reverse-engineered IGRP, because Cisco has some patents on it. Given how aggressive they are in protecting their trademarks, I'd be amazed if their legal staff wouldn't pounce on someone doing so. When it was first becoming obvious that RIP wouldn't scale to the networks then under development, Cisco very reasonably started developing IGRP. It's generally believed that they offered it to the IETF as a potential standard, but other vendors did not want to let something become standard with Cisco's experience base in place. So, the IETF effort for a second-generation standard protocol was politically motivated to be non-IGRP, and would up being OSPF. ISIS existed at the time, but at that point, there were political wars between the OSI and IETF people. While I haven't seen an IETF proposal, I have the impression that Cisco is being much more open about licensing CDP (although obviously it will have to be called something else as a standard), or using it as the base for some other protocol. It does do something generally useful. There's certainly precedent, because HSRP really derives from a DEC protocol (whose name escapes me) that was used in VAXclusters, and VRRP is very, very close to HSRP but multivendor. -- "What Problem are you trying to solve?" ***send Cisco questions to the list, so all can benefit -- not directly to me*** ******************************************************************************** Howard C. Berkowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chief Technology Officer, GettLab/Gett Communications http://www.gettlabs.com Technical Director, CertificationZone.com http://www.certificationzone.com "retired" Certified Cisco Systems Instructor (CID) #93005 Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=44026&t=43994 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]