Faster EIGRP Feasible Successor Failover

The feasible successor is EIGRP predetermining an alternate next hop to reach a destination for fast failover. The feasible successor route is stored in the EIGRP topology table but is not installed in the RIB/FIB by default. The variance command can be used to promote the feasible successor to the routing table and traffic will

OSPF in Phase 1 DMVPN Networks

When designing hub and spoke networks, most architects will opt for distance or path vector routing protocols when given the choice. I don’t blame them, distance/path vector provides several benefits that work well in hub and spoke topologies. EIGRP based hub and spoke networks can scale to thousands of spokes without much work. Route summarization

OSPFv2 Link State Advertisements

Link State Advertisements (LSAs) are one of hardest things to understand while learning OSPF. I believe that having a basic understanding of the LSA types and being able to interpret them is crucial to understanding OSPF operation. LSAs are flooded to populate the Link State Database (LSDB) on routers participating in OSPF. The content of

It works! (kinda)

We finally have spoke to spoke traffic working in our phase 1 DMVPN! After fixing the BGP third party next hop issue described in the last post we still had reachability issues between spokes. The spokes could reach the hub and the hub could reach the spokes just fine. Traffic transiting the hub to route

Home Lab DMVPN Lessons Learned

My last post was about the home-to-home DMVPN we’ve been working on. The design intent was to build a phase 1 DMVPN so spoke to spoke traffic should use the hub as a transit node. It wasn’t until we tried to forward traffic from spoke to spoke that we realized we have issues. Spoke to

eBGP, TTL and Connected-Check

It is well known that eBGP packets default to having a Time to Live (TTL) value of 1. This has caused confusion for many network practitioners who wish to run eBGP between loopback addresses of directly connected routers. This misunderstanding sometimes leads to ebgp-multihop being configured when it is not necessary. This also gave me

Next Hop Recursive-Looped

In this morning’s lab exercise I intentionally designed and configured a network to cause recursively looped routing lookups. When I started the experiment, I did not know this is the term for this condition. I simply wanted to see what would happen if the route to the destination was also the route to the next

OSPF Autoconfiguration with Python

I find that sometimes when I want to lab up a specific scenario I have to do the same “router ospf 1234” and “network 198.51.blah.blah area blah” commands over and over just to get basic routing configured. Awhile ago I wrote an EIGRP auto configuration script but at that time I didn’t know about the