CCNP Routing Study Guide v1.22 – Aaron Balchunas
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All original material copyright © 2013 by
Aaron Balchunas (aaron@routeralley.com),
unless otherwise noted. All other material copyright © of their respective owners.
This material may be copied and used freely, but may not be altered or sold without the expressed written
consent of the owner of the above copyright. Updated material may be found at http://www.routeralley.com.
129
OSPF Designated Routers
In multi-access networks such as
Ethernet, there is the possibility of
many neighbor relationships on the
same physical segment. In the above
example, four routers are connected
into the same multi-access segment.
Using the following formula (where
“n” is the number of routers):
n(n-1)/2
…..it is apparent that 6 separate adjacencies are needed for a fully meshed
network. Increase the number of routers to five, and 10 separate adjacencies
would be required. This leads to a considerable amount of unnecessary Link
State Advertisement (LSA) traffic.
If a link off of Router A were to fail, it would flood this information to all
neighbors. Each neighbor, in turn, would then flood that same information to
all other neighbors. This is a waste of bandwidth and processor load.
To prevent this, OSPF will elect a Designated Router (DR) for each multi-
access networks, accessed via multicast address 224.0.0.6. For redundancy
purposes, a Backup Designated Router (BDR) is also elected.
OSPF routers will form adjacencies with the DR and BDR. If a change
occurs to a link, the update is forwarded only to the DR, which then
forwards it to all other routers. This greatly reduces the flooding of LSAs.
DR and BDR elections are determined by a router’s OSPF priority, which
is configured on a per-interface basis (a router can have interfaces in
multiple multi-access networks). The router with the highest priority
becomes the DR; second highest becomes the BDR. If there is a tie in
priority, whichever router has the highest Router ID will become the DR.
To change the priority on an interface:
Router(config-if)# ip ospf priority 125
Default priority on Cisco routers is 1. A priority of 0 will prevent the router
from being elected DR or BDR. Note: The DR election process is not
preemptive. Thus, if a router with a higher priority is added to the network, it
will not automatically supplant an existing DR. Thus, a router that should
never become the DR should always have its priority set to 0.