July 1994 Subject: How can I get my cisco to talk to a 3rd-party router over Frame Relay?
You should tell your cisco to use “encapsulation frame-relay ietf” (instead of “encapsulation frame-relay”) on your serial interface that’s running frame relay if your frame relay network contains a diverse set of manufacturers’ routers. The keyword “ietf” specifies that your cisco will use RFC1294-compliant encapsulation, rather than the default, RFC1490-compliant encapsulation (other products, notably Novell MPR 2.11, use a practice sanctioned by 1294 but deemed verbotten by 1490, namely padding of the nlpid). If only a few routers in your frame relay cloud require this, then you can use the default encapsulation on everything and specify the exceptions with the frame-relay map command: frame-relay map ip 10.1.2.3 56 broadcast ietf ^^^^ (ietf stands for Internet Engineering Task Force, the body which evaluates Standards-track RFCs; this keyword is a misnomer as both RFC1294 and RFC1490 are ietf-approved, however 1490 is most recent and is a Draft Standard (DS), whereas 1294 is
