I have FRR/OSPF running to manage fail over between sites (OpenVPN tunnels) as described in the Hangout by John Pringle. So far - everything is working really well and doing exactly what it should for interfaces.

I now wanted to add Virtual IPs to an interface and distribute those via static routes (Zebra) to the neighbours. Now comes the weird thing. When I first tried it, Zebra recognised it as a connected route but did neither select nor forward it.

By accident, when validating the config, did I mess up the network mask and increased it on the zebra side (27 zebra vs. 28 on the Virtual IP side). And voila - the route was selected and forwarded to the neighbours.

It can be reproduced. Adjusting the network mask in zebra or Virtual IP kills the routing again.

That's how I set up the static routing now - having a large mask on zebra side. But this seems awkward to me - especially knowing pfsense for some time now.

So where is my mistake in setting up this. Is there an order to follow to avoid this behaviour?

A bit clueless - honestly

P.S. All nodes running on pfsense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p2