IP Routing of Cisco Router3.0汇总.docVIP

Welcome to the final part in a 3 part series of articles about routers and routing. Previously I wrote about how routers work and the routing table in parts 1 and 2 respectively. I am now going to talk about IP routing and how you can manipulate routes to “direct” traffic. An Important Fact About IP Routing Most People Forget When packets take a certain route to their destination they DO NOT have to take the same route back. I can’t stress this enough, packets DO NOT record the route they take. This is a big misconception among some IT professionals. Let’s say you are playing an online game, you have a connection established with the game server and data is constantly being sent and received. The packets you send may go across 5 routers, but the packets that come back CAN and most likely take a completely different route using 7 other routers. Always remember this when troubleshooting IP routing issues. Here is a classic of example of how you can get it wrong. Let’s say you are troubleshooting a network problem and suspect the cause is related to IP routing. You decide to use the PING command to test that routing is configured correctly. The device you ping is 4 hops (routers/networks) away. The ping fails. For the sake of simplicity we will assume that everything else is working perfectly and it should reply. You now use the trace route command to investigate further and find it is in fact routing correctly; you can see packets going across all 4 hops and arriving at the destination. At this point you assume routing is working correctly so move on to look elsewhere. The problem however, was not that the packets couldn’t get to the destination, it was that they couldn’t come back. It could be as simple as a misconfigured default gateway on the destination PC; packets would arrive there but when replying the PC would send them to a wrongly configured gateway and consequently fail. What you should have done is run a trace route at both locations to test IP routing in