Details on the company's turnaround strategy are vague so far.
It’s funny, in my exerperience, OSPF is the most widely used interior gateway protocol because it “just works” and it’s an IETF standard which means it interops between different vendors and platforms. However, if you really start to look at how OSPF works, you realize it’s actually a highly complex protocol. So on the one hand you get a protocol that likely works across your whole environment, regardless of vendor/platform, but on the other you’re implementing a lot of complexity in your control plane which may not be intuitive to troubleshoot.
This post isn’t a judgement about OSPF or link-state protocols in general. Instead it will detail five functional aspects of OSPF in order to reveal–at least in part–how this protocol works, and indirectly, some of the complexity lying under the hood.
Ever looked closely at OSPF routes in the show ip route
output? You’ll notice flags such as O
or O IA
beside the route.
O 10.1.14.0 255.255.255.0
[110/21] via 123.1.0.18, 00:00:07, Ethernet0/0
O IA 11.11.11.0 [110/20] via 123.1.0.18, 00:00:07, Ethernet0/0
O IA 123.1. Continue reading
The goal is to be able to orchestrate services across multiple networks.