Friday, December 21, 2012

Router OSPF Overview-Section 2



This is Part 2 of the Router OSPF Serieswhich will cover topics about OSPF Areasand OSPF LSA’s. Before continuing on I recommend reading Part 1 of the Router OSPF Series which gives an introduction on the topic.

For the ICND2 and CCNA exam you will only need to configure a single area OSPF implementation, but you will still be required to know many different things about a full multi-area OSPF network.
OSPF is a link-state routing protocol that stores a complete topology map of the network it is in. In order for OSPF to know where the shortest routes are to each network it has to calculate it off of the topology map using the Dijkstra algorithm every time there is a change in the network. This process can take up a lot of CPU cycles and slow down the routing process if there are many routers. In order for OSPF to be able to scale well in larger network situations with a lot of routers it uses Areas to logically break up the network.

OSPF Router Types
Backbone Router – Every OSPF implementation must have a backbone area. The backbone area will always be area 0. A Backbone router is any router that has an interface connected to area 0.
Area Border Router (ABR) – Are routers that have on interface in area 0 and another interface in a different area. ABR’s sit between the two areas. All ABR’s are backbone routers because they have an interface connected to area 0.
Autonomous System Boundary Router (ASBR) – Share information with other routers that are not running OSPF.
Internal Router – Are routers that are not area border routers. They simply are routers running OSPF, but are not passing information between areas.

Here is an example of a network with multiple OSPF areas so that you can visually see the different OSPF router roles amongst the areas.
Types of OSPF Areas
Backbone Area – This area is also known as the standard area. Every OSPF implementation has to have one. Backbone areas accept all types of LSA’s.
Stub Area – Will only receive summary LSA’s. Routing LSA’s are NOT allowed.
Totally Stubby Area – Absolutely no LSA’s are allowed.
Not So Stubby Area (NSSA) – This is a stub area that has a ASBR router that receives information from another routing protocol other than OSPF and passes it into the OSPF network.

OSPF LSA Types
There are seven different types of Link-State advertisements that OSPF routers pass around to check up on each other. When you type “show ip route” on a Cisco router to see the routing table, ospf entries will show up with the letter “o” in front. There are also many different variations that will show up in the routing table depending on the LSA type.
LSA Type 1: “O” — Intra-Area — Passed around inside an area
LSA Type 2: “O 1A — Inter-area — Pass through an area
LSA Type 3: Summary LSA by an ABR
LSA Type 4: Summary LSA to an ASBR
LSA Type 5: “O E1″ or “O E2″ — From an ASBR about external links
LSA Type 6: This is a Groupe Membership Link LSA that is sent out by multicast OSPF Routers
LSA Type 7: “O N1″ or “O N2″ — These are NSSA external routes from an ASBR

Well, I Think that is quite a bit of OSPF information for today. Tomorrow I’m actually going to show you how to configure OSPF since we still haven’t gone over that yet.

More OSPF Reviews:

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