OSPF for Traffic Routing
Robert Collazo
Rasmussen College

Author Note
This research is being submitted on August 30, 2013, for Christine Stagnetto-Zweig’s N235/CET2629 Section 02 Cisco Networking Fundamentals and Routing course.

OSPF for Traffic Routing
The OSPF dynamic routing protocol is probably the most popular LAN routing protocol today. OSPF can scale to the largest LANs but can also start out small. With OSPF, every router has its own unique "picture" (topology map) of the network. Routers use "HELLO" packets to periodically check with routers to ensure they are still there. Every router in OSPF is identified with a "router ID". The router ID can be manually entered or OSPF will automatically choose the IP address with the highest number. To configure OSPF,
Set the bandwidth on your interfaces using the bandwidth command Router (config-if)# bandwidth XX (where XX signifies the bandwidth of the WAN connection).
Router (config)# router ospf {process-ID#}
Next, instruct the router to advertise the networks that are directly linked to it by entering network statements with the area ID number for that network,
Router (config-router)# network {X.X.X.X} {Y.Y.Y.Y} area {z}
X.X.X.X = Network ID of Network
Y.Y.Y.Y = the wildcard mask for the network (the wildcard mask is the inverse mask of the subnet mask).
Z = the area ID number (For small networks, this can always be zero (0) but for larger networks, the area IDs need to be properly planned as all routing updates must traverse area 0).
You should enter a network statement for every network directly attached to the router.
Once OSPF is configured, you can check the status using the show ip route and show ip ospf commands.
Example
Here is an example of a router configured with the OSPF routing protocol using our router set up from last week.
Interface Gigabit Ethernet 0/0 ip address 182.62.00