In various exemplary embodiments, the present invention provides a low-cost, low-processing overhead mechanism for distributing routing, topology, reachability, and recovery information across the interface between two nodes that may then be used by a network or client device to populate a topology database, route a connection, recover from a connection failure, etc. Specifically, the methods and systems of the present invention use a link management interface and the associated link management protocol(s) to distribute this routing, topology, reachability, and recovery information, adding it to the normal link management protocol(s).