BASIC OSPF - Route Summarization Between Areas

Route summarization has two benefits. There is the more obvious benefit, of shrinking routing
tables. With distance vector protocols, this includes the benefit of reducing routing update traffic.
The less obvious benefit is that summarization means you're tracking whether or not you're
connected to some subnets of a summary, not the up/down state of every link. Thus when the
link goes up or down, you don't have a flurry of traffic announcing the state change. (OSPF and
EIGRP both react quickly to changes, the drawback being that one might consider them to be a
bit hyperactive.) And when you have a flapping interface (up/down over and over again), this
can make a real difference. With OSPF, recalculating the Dijkstra algorithm can take significant
CPU and time (a couple of seconds, anyway) -- doing this over and over again in response to a
flap is a bit ugly.

Route summarization can reduce traffic and computation in an OSPF network. It can render your
network more stable. The final benefit is in troubleshooting. A careful design assigns
summarizable blocks of addresses to different regions in the network. You can then look at one
route saying "this way to Australia", instead of dealing with odds and ends of subnets, looking
them up, and then recognizing, "ah, yes, most of Australia seems to be present in the routing
table". You probably don't care which links in Australia are up or down, but you do want to be
able to route packets to Australia.

Configuration
Routing within an area is performed by OSPF routers using the least cost path to the destination
network. Because routes within an area are not summarized, each router has a route to each
network within its area or areas.

Routing between areas takes the following course:

1. Routers within the source area forward the packet along the least cost path to the nearest
ABR.
2. Backbone routers forward the packet along the least cost path to the nearest ABR
connected to the area containing the IP address of the destination host.
3. Routers within the area containing the IP address of the destination host forward the
packet along the least cost path to the destination host.

OSPF routers do not make routing decisions based on area IDs. All routing decisions are based
on the entries in the IP routing table.

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Inter-area route summarization is done on ABRs and it applies to routes from within the AS. It
does not apply to external routes injected into OSPF via redistribution. In order to take advantage
of summarization, network numbers in areas should be assigned in a contiguous way to be able
to lump these addresses into one range.

Redistribute Summarization Between Areas

NetStepByStep-R3(config-router)# area <area ID> range < IP address> < IP mask>

Use to consolidate and summarize routes at an area boundary.

Use this command in router configuration mode.
To disable this function, use the no form of this command.
<area id> stands for the identifier of the area about which routes are to be
summarized. It can be specified as either a decimal value or as an IP address.
< IP address> stands for the IP address.
< IP mask> stands for the IP mask.
The area range command is used only with area border routers (ABRs). It is used to
consolidate or summarize routes for an area.
The result is that a single summary route is advertised to other areas by the ABR.
Routing information is condensed at area boundaries.
Multiple area router configuration commands specifying the range option can be
configured. Thus, OSPF can summarize addresses for many different sets of address
ranges.

Verification
show ip route

Use to displays the current status of the routing table.

Use this command in EXEC mode.

NetStepByStep-R2# sh ip route | in 66.

66.0.0.0/24 is subnetted, 1 subnets
O IA 66.66.66.0 [110/111] via 24.24.24.4, 00:00:17, Ethernet0/2

Troubleshoot
Debug ip ospf lsa-generation

Use to displays information about each OSPF LSA generated.

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Video Cheat Sheet

R3
router ospf 3
area 2 range 66.66.66.0 255.255.255.0

R4
router ospf 4
area 2 range 66.66.66.0 255.255.255.0

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