Your BSCI exam may well be the most challenging of the four exams you must

pass to become a CCNP, so you have to have the details of every protocol on the
exam mastered! Today, we'll look at the passive-interface command as it relates to
OSPF.

Passive interfaces accept routing updates, but do not send them. Regarding OSPF,
even though OSPF does not sent "routing updates" in the form that RIP, IGRP, and
EIGRP do, you can still configure an OSPF-enabled interface as passive in order to
prevent OSPF traffic from exiting that interface. No OSPF adjacency can be formed
if one of the interfaces involved is a passive interface, and if you configure an
OSPF-enabled interface as passive where an adjacency already exists, the
adjacency will drop almost immediately.

In the following example, R1 and R2 have an existing OSPF adjacency over their
Ethernet interfaces. In an effort to reduce routing traffic, R1's e0 interface is
configured as passive. The adjacency drops right away.

R1(config)#router ospf 1

R1(config-router)#passive-interface ethernet0

R1(config-router)#

18:31:11: %OSPF-5-ADJCHG: Process 1, Nbr 2.2.2.2 on Ethernet0 from FULL to

DOWN, Neighbor Down: Interface down or detached

That's a pretty important detail to keep in mind when you're using the passive-
interface command, wouldn't you say?

You may well have a router that you want to configure most interfaces as passive.
There's no longer a need to configure each interface as passive in that case - As of
IOS version 12.0, you can now set all interfaces on a router as passive for a given
protocol with the passive-interface default command. You can then configure each
interface that you do NOT want to be passive with the "no passive-interface"
command.

R3(config)#router ospf 1

R3(config-router)#passive-interface default
To set the interfaces back to their default, just use the no passive-interface default
command.

R3(config-router)#no passive-interface default

The passive interface is a simple topic, but it can get a little tricky when you start
changing the default and then start configuring interfaces on an individual level.
Just be careful with this command on exam day and in the real world, and you'll
succeed in the BSCI exam room and on real-world networks as well!