Link State Routing(OSPF) and Distance Vector Routing(DVR) exercises why so few?

[networkloser]

I've been searching my entire day for exercises. And finally went to chatpgt. It gave me some exercises but without context. Here's what it told me:


2. Solve Theoretical Problems
Practice questions and scenarios:

Analyze a network graph and calculate routing tables manually.
Trace how routing tables evolve over time in a distance-vector protocol.
Compute shortest paths using Dijkstra's algorithm for link-state routing.
Compare and contrast RIP vs. OSPF through theoretical scenarios.


About where to find problems it told me "CCNA" would have such problems as a part of exam. Can you point me towards it? Because I can merely find anything on my own so far.

[deanwebb]

Yes, that information is in the CCNA official guide, volume 2.

https://www.amazon.com/CCNA-200-301-Official-Guide-Library/dp/0138221391 <-- not affiliated with me or the site in any way, but it's a solid resource I recommend. This will have examples that you're looking for.

For a real-life example, I can think of many large enterprises where there are major datacenters that connect to large national/regional offices that then support a range of sub-offices. There has to be a routing system in place that allows for geolocation within the enterprise, especially where different nations have different rules on data storage and access.

With that geographic consideration, there's also the overlay of redundancy, where enterprises want to utilize both primary and secondary links in normal times, but have the ability to put all traffic on one link or another in an emergency situation, with QoS policy shaping the traffic to fit the bandwidth available.

So consider an enterprise with datacenters A and B in North America, and datacenters C and D in Europe. It has a smaller datacenter E in Latin America and a smaller datacenter F in Asia.

Due to regulations, it also has a small datacenter G in Germany for handling German data and datacenter H in China for Chinese business operations.

For each datacenter, there is one main regional office and 20 regional sub-offices, so there are 2 main offices in North America and 40 sub-offices. Same in Europe, with 1/20 in Latin America and Asia. Germany has the one main office and 5 more sub-offices and China has one main office and 25 sub-offices.

Each sub-office has one internet link and each main office has two. Each datacenter has four separate internet connections.

Now, if a person takes an order in Germany for delivery in China and sends a message to the Chinese office for their awareness, the message goes from the German sub-office to the German main office to a main office in Europe to a Euro data center to the Asian data center to the Chinese data center to the Chinese main office to the Chinese sub-office.

Given the redundant connections, how would you rate each such that there is one main path to choose based on distance and cost, but still have alternate paths in the event of an outage? But to be sure that each alternate path has its own distance and cost so that slower links or more expensive links are not used in favor of the bulk traffic routes?

And what happens if a datacenter goes down? How does that affect routing decisions? When the datacenter comes back up, what cost/distance factors restore paths that were previously in place? How do we make sure that each main office (and its sub-offices) prefers only one data center over the other, for purposes of load balancing?

I'm here to work through these with you, so if you do some initial work, I'll be happy to coach along.

[icecream-guy]

I would suggest here
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/distance-vector-routing-dvr-protocol/

review DVRA
and review the GATE CS Corner Questions

[networkloser]

I read the networking explained book and it has covered this description neatly.