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Friday, April 29, 2011

Adjacencies on Non-Broadcast Multi-Access (NBMA) Networks

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_white_paper09186a0080094e9e.shtml#t24

Special care should be taken when configuring OSPF over multi-access non-broadcast medias such as Frame Relay, X.25, ATM. The protocol considers these media like any other broadcast media such as Ethernet. NBMA clouds are usually built in a hub and spoke topology. PVCs or SVCs are laid out in a partial mesh and the physical topology does not provide the multi access that OSPF believes is out there. The selection of the DR becomes an issue because the DR and BDR need to have full physical connectivity with all routers that exist on the cloud. Also, because of the lack of broadcast capabilities, the DR and BDR need to have a static list of all other routers attached to the cloud. This is achieved using the neighbor ip-address [priority number] [poll-interval seconds] command, where the "ip-address" and "priority" are the IP address and the OSPF priority given to the neighbor. A neighbor with priority 0 is considered ineligible for DR election. The "poll-interval" is the amount of time an NBMA interface waits before polling (sending a Hello) to a presumably dead neighbor. The neighbor command applies to routers with a potential of being DRs or BDRs (interface priority not equal to 0). The following diagram shows a network diagram where DR selection is very important:

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