Nichewares & Consulting, LLC

This is a very simple process. At the time of this writing, RHEL 3 ships with quagga (a fork of the zebra routing software). Quagga is now used to managed advanced routing protocols given that the running kernel supports those protocols.


Installation

Install quagga (current version is 0.96.2). Change owner of /etc/quagga/* to quagga. Create log files for quagga daemons to use: /var/log/zebra.log and /var/log/ospfd.log. Change owner on these log files to quagga.


Config files

Configure zebra config file: copy /etc/quagga/zebra.conf.sample to /etc/quagga/zebra.conf. Configure this file to only have the following lines:


hostname machine.domain.com

password your_choice

log file /var/log/zebra.log


Configure the ospfd.conf file: copy /etc/quagga/ospfd.conf.sample to /etc/quagga/ospfd.conf. Configure this file to only have the following lines:


router ospf

network 192.168.1.0/24 area 0

!the line above is required apparently. It specifies a network space which dictates which

!interface will use OSPF e.g. if eth0 has public address and eth1 has 192.168.1.1, eth1

! will use OSPF and eth0 will not

log file /var/log/ospfd.conf


Firewall

Be sure to configure iptables to accept tcp ports 2600-2606. On a proxy server where ports are redirected, bypass the redirection and just accept packets coming in on these ports. Save iptables config.


Starting daemons

Start the zebra daemon first. This daemon should be started first since it provides some info to ospfd during startup. Then start ospfd. Be sure both zebra and ospfd daemons are set to startup at boot time (chkconfig zebra on).

Note: This works very well on a stand-alone server, but fails miserably on a two node cluster. When failover occurs, routes disappear and have to be re-enumerated, causing network interruptions to clients. It's not recommended to run ospf in a cluster environment.