Zone Problems Caused by Old Phase 1 Routers



I have a Phase 1 network with FastPaths bridging between LocalTalk and
Ethernet. It has a problem seeing a defined as 0, which is causing some
network problems. What is the cause of this?

The problem you're seeing is caused by older Phase 1 routers that are seeing
the new-style, Phase 2 non-extended RTMP packets. New-style, non-extended RTMP
packets have a special tuple as the first tuple in the set. This tuple
contains 2 bytes of 0 and 1 byte used for an RTMP version number (0x82,131
decimal).

Older Phase 1 routers do not understand that this tuple is not a valid network
tuple and, instead, interprets it as a distant network. This is usually
reported as network 0, 131 hops away. This should not cause any significant
problems for your network, but you should try to get all of your routers
updated to the most recent releases available from the different vendors.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012