FRR 0.6 Coming - Big changes to OSPF

jimp

FRR 0.6 is rolling out in 2.5.0 snapshots (as they build, so may not be in all platforms yet) and it's a significant change from the previous version where OSPF is concerned. I enumerate the changes below, and I have attempted to lower the chances of breakage with upgrade code, but there is still a chance that if you rely on OSPF connectivity it might be disrupted by the update.

The OSPF GUI has been overhauled to allow much more complex configurations and lots of possible options have been added which were not present in older versions.

The primary reason that there may be a connectivity disruption is that I have deprecated the old and confusing method of using "Networks" on the main screen. These never worked as users expected, and they conflict with the much more appropriate method in FRR of defining areas on interfaces instead of defining "networks" for an area which are never used exactly, but only as a means to select interfaces. FRR ospfd won't start with both methods defined, and correlating one to the other in an automated way at the time upgrade code gets run is not reliable.

If you only use a single area, then all you really need to do is remove all network entries from the main OSPF settings tab. So long as you have defined all the proper interfaces, things will just work. If you use multiple areas, then edit your interfaces and make sure each one has the correct area defined. Network list entries that had "Do not redistribute" checked will be automatically removed on upgrade after their values have been migrated to a proper FRR access list.

Changes in this release include:

UI/Backend Changes
- Added lots of missing OSPF input validation
- Updated field descriptions, help text, default values, allowed ranges, etc
- New Area tab to define multiple areas and per-area options, including:
  - Area types (stub, nssa, totally, etc)
  - Area authentication
  - Route summarization
  - ABR Summary route filtering
  - ABR Shortcut
- Main OSPF options changes
  - Reorganized options, split into sections
  - Area changed to Default Area
    - These values are used for interfaces which do not have an area defined, which helps with backward compatibility with existing settings
  - Redistribute options greatly expanded
    - Can now set route map, distribute list, metric, and metric type for each protocol
  - Network list deprecated
    - "Do not redistribute" migrated to route map, access list, etc. See upgrade code notes.
    - Use areas on interfaces to activate networks for use in OSPF
    - This section will be removed from a future version of the FRR package since it is incompatible with using areas on interfaces directly
  - Added new fields:
    - Opaque LSA support
    - Reference Bandwidth
    - Max Metric options (admin, startup seconds, shutdown seconds)
    - Write multiplier
    - ABR Type
- Interfaces
  - Reorganized options, split into sections
  - Authentication changes:
    - Converted authentication options to a drop-down selection
    - Added 'null' type
    - Changed the way auth is automatically enabled in areas: If enabled on an interface but not in an area, it gets enabled for the area, but area options can override this.
  - Added new options:
    - Ignore MTU
    - Minimal Hello
Added Upgrade Code
- If there are any OSPF network entries set with "Do not redistribute"
  - Migrates current do-not-redistribute entries to FRR global access list "dnr-list" and removes these entries
  - Creates a route map named "DNR" which uses the "dnr-list" access list
  - Creates a new Area configuration based on the default area, using "dnr-list" as its export-list
  - For enabled redistribute route protocols, the "DNR" route-map is pre-selected and the "dnr-list" ACL is used for the distribute list
- Migrates OSPF interface authentication to select values (e.g. digest or simple)
- The "updatefib" OSPF option has been renamed to "areatype"

If there are no major issues with the update after a shake-down period then I'll look into bringing it back to 2.4.4-p3.

jimp

FYI: I am merging these changes back to 2.4.4-p3 today.

If you have problems with the new version, please start a new thread with the details.