OSPF Required Information

Before starting, take the time to gather all of the information required to form an OSPF adjacency to a neighbor. At a minimum, TNSR will need to know these items:

VRF Name:

The name of the Virtual Routing and Forwarding instance for which this OSPF instance will manage routes, or default for the default route table.

Local Router ID:

Typically the highest numbered local address on the firewall. This is also frequently set as the internal or LAN side IP address of a router. It does not matter what this ID is, so long as it is given in IPv4 address notation and does not conflict with any neighbors.

OSPF Area:

A designation for the set of networks to which this router belongs. Typically set to 0.0.0.0 for simple internal deployments, but can be any number capable of being expressed in dotted quad notation (IPv4 address) or as a 32-bit unsigned integer.

OSPF Active Interfaces:

The interfaces on this router upon which the OSPF daemon will advertise itself and look for neighbors. These interfaces are connected to network segments with other routers. They may be connected to local networks or remote point-to-point links. These interfaces must be configured with IP addresses.

Warning

Outside NAT interfaces (ip nat outside) cannot be used as active interfaces in OSPF! The presence of NAT prevents OSPF from properly communicating with neighbors to form a full adjacency.

OSPF Active Interface Cost Values:

OSPF calculates the most efficient way to route between networks based on the total cost of a path from source to destination. Less desirable links (e.g. wireless) can be given a higher cost so that paths over faster networks will be used by traffic unless the preferred path is unavailable. For single connections to other networks, this value is not necessary and may be omitted or set to a simple default such as 5 or 10.

OSPF Passive Interfaces:

These interfaces contain networks which should be advertised as reachable through this router, but do not contain other routers.

The example in this section uses the following values:

Example OSPF Configuration

Item	Value
VRF Name	default
Local Router ID	10.2.0.1
OSPF Area	0.0.0.0
Active Interfaces (Cost)	TenGigabitEthernet6/0/0 (10)
Passive Interfaces	GigabitEthernet3/0/0