OSPF resources the RFC "The Bible"

The following is a copy and paste of my response to someone asking about OSPF resources.

People, when you are studying for your CCIE Routing and Switch or whatever track you are doing research and consult and dominate. For OSPF I use the RFC which is a great document that tells you how it works.


Here was my response with some additional information:


I use http://www.rfc-editor.org/ to look up RFC's. I found that RFC 2328 is what the Cisco Press is based on. So while most people shy away from the RFC it's the STANDARD.

Let’s think about it this way. Let’s say you have a friend who tells you the following sentence :

My friend is coming over, tell Bob I’ll call him when I’m done. You decide “I don’t got time for this I’ll pass this on to Steve”

So let’s say that you are Mr. PERFECT and remembered exactly what was said, you tell this to Steve (who also doesn’t have time to go directly to Bob) who then tells it to Jack who tells it to Mary etc etc etc……

By time the last person gets the message to Bob the message reads:

THE CHICKEN IS IN THE OVEN AND IT’S ALMOST DONE.

Laugh if you want, go ahead knock your self out….there is a point to all this..


When learning networking you have 2 views on something

The Vendor neutral view and the Vendor’s implementation.

For OSPF you have the RFC view, on how from a vendor independent stand point how that technology was designed to work. Sometimes, the view a vendor takes on presenting the information to you gets a little off or is downright WRONG. I'm sure others can attest to this.......

For OSPF you also have the vendor specific way of doing it. In this case CISCO. Obviously there are additions to OSPF like certain types of stubby areas etc. Just like there is Weight for BGP on Cisco implementations, but this doesn’t exist on Juniper as it’s a Cisco only implementation.

If you survived reading all of that I assure you what I am saying if you read the RFC first before reading anything else – you will have a CLEAR picture of how something is supposed to work instead of jumping in and learning by configuration which I think is a mistake before tackling the theory. I realize, yes this is not what you stated Raghav, but I recommend starting out with the RFC.

CISCO press books interpret the RFC’s and so does every other Networking book out there. Start with the source (the RFC) and work your way up.

Theory, configure, validate and troubleshoot. The golden rules of the game.


Now for the actual OSPF RFC: You should have a list of these in your study materials for ALL IGP’s and know them well.

OSPF RFC 3228 (about 200 pages packed with excitement)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2328.txt

Once you can nail the OSPF 'Bickity Bamn' you will be a master.

-Nick