Owner's Manual

Chapter 14. Routing Policies | 346

14. Routing Policies

This chapter includes the following sections:

• Overview on page 346

• Routing Policy File Syntax on page 346

• Applying Routing Policies on page 352

• Policy Examples on page 353

Overview

Routing policies are used to control the advertisement or recognition of routes communicated by

routing protocols, such as Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF),

and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Routing policies can be used to “hide” entire networks or to

trust only specific sources for routes or ranges of routes. The capabilities of routing policies are

specific to the type of routing protocol involved, but these policies are sometimes more efficient

and easier to implement than access lists.

Routing policies can also modify and filter routing information received and advertised by a

switch.

A similar type of policy is an ACL policy, used to control, at the hardware level, the packets

accessing the switch. ACL policy files and routing policy files are both handled by the policy

manager and the syntax for both types of files is checked by the policy manager.

Note: Although XCM8800 does not prohibit mixing ACL and routing type

entries in a policy file, it is strongly recommended that you do not

mix the entries, and you use separate policy files for ACL and

routing policies.

Routing Policy File Syntax

A routing policy file contains one or more policy rule entries. Each routing policy entry

consists of: