Yes, I'm replying to myself.
While doing some reading it occurred to me why *not* extending area 0 across
the WAN links should not work. In OSPF, unlike IS-IS, an area is defined by
links, not routers. The rule states that interarea traffic must go through
area 0. Well, if areas are defined by links, then this means that interarea
traffic must at least go across one link that is defined as an area 0 link.
In a hub-and-spoke environment with a single hub router, it seems to me that
there just is no good way to use multiarea OSPF if you don't extend area 0
across the WAN links.
At least, that's the way it appears at the moment.
John
| I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around a specific scenario and I
| wanted to get your thoughts. Let's say we have a hub and spoke network
| with a single router as the hub. There are five areas attached to the
| backbone. It seems that we would have to extend area 0 across the WAN
| links, but I'm wondering what would happen if we didn't.
|
| If we didn't, the backbone router would have no interfaces in area 0.
| I'm wondering if this would cause some major problems. I bet that it
| would but I'm having a hard time thinking through what actual problems
| might arise. Would this backbone router just "know" that it was area 0
| because it has interfaces in multiple non-zero areas and hence behave
| correctly?
|
| One obvious problem is that the backbone router would be a member of
| every area and would thus be pretty busy if the network got to be very
| big. If we extended area 0 across the WAN link the backbone router
| would be protected from running SPF calculations everytime a remote area
| had a link change.
|
| What other problems would arise? Would this even work at all? I don't
| really have the tools to try it or I'd just attempt this chaos myself.
| As you can guess, we run eigrp everywhere so I'm still clueless to some
| of the workings of OSPF in a production environment.
|
| Regards,
| John
|
|
|
|
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