
Configuring IP Services
4-2
Link States and Shortest Path Trees
OSPF is a
link-state protocol
. A router running a link-state protocol periodically
tests the status of the physical connection to each of its neighbor routers and sends
this information to its other neighbors. A link-state protocol does not require each
router to send its entire routing table to its neighbors. Instead, each router floods
only link-state change information throughout the system (a system, in this case,
may be the autonomous system, or a subset of the autonomous system called an
area
). This process is referred to as the synchronization of the routers’ topological
databases.
With the link information, each router builds a
shortest-path tree
with itself as the
root of the tree. It then can identify the shortest path from itself to each destination
and build its routing table.
OSPF Addresses and Variable-Length Masks
A destination in as OSPF route advertisement is expressed as an IP address and a
variable-length mask. Taken together, the address and the mask indicate the range
of destinations to which the advertisement applies.
The ability to specify a range of networks allows OSPF to send one summary
advertisement that represents multiple destinations. For example, a summary
advertisement for the destination 128.185.0.0 with a mask of 0xffff0000 describes
a single route to destinations 128.185.0.0 to 128.185.255.255.
Configuring the OSPF Soloist and Backup on a Slot
The OSPF protocol is implemented as a
soloist
— that is, as a single process
running on a single slot of a router. When you add an OSPF interface to a circuit,
the router enables OSPF on a slot. If the slot on which the OSPF soloist is running
goes down, the router will attempt to run OSPF on another slot. The router uses
any available slot (the default) or a slot specified by the network administrator.
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