Category: IOS fossils

In the classful days of the Internet, it made sense to limit the amount of information redistributed between the routing protocols. OSPF was always classless, but RIPv1 wasn’t … and you could get all sorts of crazy routes from RIP that would mess up the rest of your network if they ever got redistributed into OSPF. To prevent that, Cisco’s engineers introduced the subnets option in the OSPF redistribute command.

By the time Cisco implemented EIGRP and BGPv4 (IOS release 9.21, 15+ years ago), the absurdity of the classful redistribution was already obvious. These routing protocols accept whatever routes you want to redistribute, and their variants of the redistribute command don’t have the subnets keyword. However, nobody ever took steps to remove this fossil from the IOS code.

Here’s a weird requirement that you could get on a really hard CCIE preparation lab (and hopefully never in a live network): redistribute external OSPF routes from selected ASBRs into BGP without using a route map on the redistribution router.

For example, assuming R1 and R2 insert external routes into OSPF, you want only routes from R1 to be redistributed into BGP on R3, but you cannot use route maps on R3.