Hello!
One of the handy Cisco IOS routing commands is to display the protocol neighbors. That allows troubleshooting determination if the other router is "listening". You might want to consider adding that feature to the client.
For RIP, BIRD supports no such command, because any router on the local network can act as a neighbor any time. No router adjacency is formed and the routing information is broadcasted (or multicasted) to all directly connected routers. It would be possible to list machines from which we have received at least one RIP route, but you can get them from the routing table. For OSPF, just use `show ospf neighbors'. For BGP, the neighbors are configured statically. Have a nice fortnight -- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth "Maintenance-free: When it breaks, it can't be fixed..."