Layer 2 ASA And OSPF
So recently I had to configure an OSPF adjacency between two routers.
I thought simply permitting multicast traffic to the All Routers and All DR/BDR Routers would permit OSPF Hellos across the link and allow OSPF adjacencies to form. In fact what I saw was routers entering the EXSTART state and the neighbourship failing. I checked the manual, for an OSPF adjacency to form, the following conditions need to be satisfied:
- Area IDs need to match
- Neighbours need to be on the same subnet
- MTUs need to match
- Hello/Dead timers need to match
- Authentication (if any is configured)
So, what I saw was the routers entering the EXSTART state and the neighbourship dropping. Bear in mind, at this point, the only thing permitted through the firewall both ways was multicast traffic to 224.0.0.5 (the AllSPF Routers multicast address) using the OSPF protocol (IP protocol 89). So for some reason the DBD exchange was not taking place.
My initial reaction was to check MTU size. I’d seen a similar issue before where an MTU mismatch (jumbo frames on one side, 1500 bytes on the other side) meant while the non-backbone area’s routes made Continue reading
