Hi
I've always avoided having routers exchange routing updates on a subnet that carries hosts. For one thing it avoids the ICMP redirect issues. These, however, can be turned off at the router. While it still feels wrong I can't think of a simple billy-basic technical reason to avoid the sharing of a subnet. There must be one....?
Can anyone advise either to mix them (hosts and routers) or a good reason not to do so?
-- TIA, James
There shouldn't be any issues with hosts and multiple routers sharing a subnet. Note that when you want redundant routers (as with HSRP/VRRP/GLBP) you will certainly have more than one router sharing a subnet with hosts.
Cisco da Gama
If the primary role of a network segment was to exchange traffic between core routers, one would probably not want to start onnecting hosts to that segment.
On an access segment that has high-availability requirements then one would probably find at least two routers running HSRP or equivalaent. Exchanging routes over this type of segment/subnet can be done but probably is indicative of a design flaw in the access to distribution layer.
Years ago I would have told you that it was a bad idea. Back then a design objective was to keep routing segments (as opposed to host segments) as pure as possible because you had many protocols (not just IP) like IPX that were very "chatty" and LAN bandwidth was at a premium because of the collisions issue.
Today? All that is gone now. Everything is pretty much IP over switched ethernet (sometimes GigE to the desktop). With that, the -only- reason left to not add PCs to critical routing segments is that some users like to play with their Network configurations and unwittingly turn their PCs into routers ... it causes some pretty fun issues!... I would preffer for that reason alone to keep them away from what I would call a "backbone" segment.
Cheers
DD
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