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Re: OSPF vs ISIS - Which do you prefer & why?


From: sthaug () nethelp no
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2016 13:46:30 +0100 (CET)

I think you misunderstood his point: it's not the knobs, but the 
vendors.  Generally, when you're trying to integrate random crap into an 
otherwise well-structured network, you'll find OSPF available, but very 
rarely IS-IS.

We never really want to talk IS-IS with random crap - in that case
the protocol of choice would be BGP.

I run into this a lot in the security appliance space, where you want 
your security appliances to either learn or advertise routes internally 
(VPN tunnel reachability is a big reason for this), but also in devices 
such as load balancers and other middlebox cruft that occasionally needs 
to participate in routing advertisement/subscription.
...
The ones who actually care about making it work almost always include 
RIP and OSPF, with a few shout-outs to BGP.  IS-IS (and OSPF v3) rarely 
makes the cut.

We've found that BGP works reasonably well to talk with such boxes,
and also that BGP is generally available.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug () nethelp no


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