Introducing OSPF– Part I
Introduction
The OSPF routing protocol is playing an increasingly important role in modern networks. It is a multi-vendor standard. We’ll take a look at OSPF basics in this article.
Running OSPF so your routers can exchange information with NT servers is probably not a Good Thing. I personally don’t want servers sending routing information to my “official routing protocol”, since I’ve seen too many servers with duplicate IP addresses or other oddities. If a server administrator goofs and duplicates the server farm subnet on some workgroup server somewhere else, and it advertises it into your network, you’re in for a serious outage! If your group controls the servers, or if NT servers are acting as low-end routers at remote sites, well, then there’s a reason to run OSPF. I’ll just mention in passing here that OSPF has an authentication feature that allows you to easily exclude any “unofficial” routers from your OSPF Autonomous System (“group of consenting routers”).
