Skip to main content

OSPF Interview Questions - Part 3


What are the tables maintained by OSPF?





  • Neighbor Table : This table stores information about all the OSPF neighbors. Can be displayed using the command : show ip ospf neighbor
  • Database / Topology Table : This table stores link state database of all the OSPF learned routes. Can be displayed using the command : show ip ospf database
  • Routing table : After running the SPF algorithm on all the routes in the database table, the best route is selected and promoted to the Routing table. Can be displayed using the command : show ip route ospf




What are the benefits of dividing an OSPF domain into multiple areas?





  • Decrease routing overhead per router (this especially makes sense for internal non-backbone routers i.e. routers inside a single non-backbone area
  • Ensure speedy convergence.. less routes implies faster processing
  • Confine network instability into single area.. the inter-area summary routes and the routes from special areas such as stub, totally stub, NSSA, totally NSSA are usually "hidden" from other areas which implies the disruptions in a single area doesn't translate to the disruptions in other areas.




For cost manipulation in OSPF, can you use offset-list command?





Offset-list doesn't work in case of OSPF. It works only for EIGRP and RIP





What is the OSPF preference order w.r.t. the areas?





  • Intra-area (O) routes are preferred over
  • Inter-area (O IA) routes are preferred over
  • External E1 (O E1) routes are preferred over
  • External E2 (O E2) routes are preferred over
  • NSSA N1 (O N1) routes are preferred over
  • NSSA N2 (O N2) routes




Something about Stub Areas





Type-5 LSA's (External routes) are not allowed. The ABR advertises a default route instead (as a Type 5 LSA). The default route cost from ABR is set using "area x default-cost" command. The only Type 5 LSA allowed in this area is the default route from ABR.





How do you flush Type-5 and Type-7 LSAs?





The "clear ip ospf redistribution" command flushes Type-5 and Type-7 LSAs and checks the routing table for the redistributed routes. The SPF calculation runs on all the OSPF routers in the network which receive these flushed LSAs.





What is the frequency of OSPF Link-State Advertisements?





Link-State Advertisements are sent every 30 minutes by default





How do you prevent an OSPF interface from forming an OSPF adjacency with the OSPF capable neighbor router?





Use "passive-interface " router sub-command to ensure that Hello packets are not sent on that particular interface thereby avoiding OSPF adjacency formation.





In case of multiple Type-5 LSAs to an external route, which route would be preferred?





The LSA with the shortest path (cost) to the ASBR would always be preferred





Can routers with different "process-id"s form adjacency?





Yes. OSPF process-id is the local property of the router and is not a parameter exchanged during the formation of OSPF adjacency





Can you run OSPF over GRE tunnel?





Yes. OSPF can be run over GRE tunnel


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MITRE ATT&CK - Kerberos Vulnerabilities and Security

From the previous post, the summary of Kerberos authentication process is as below: For the initial authentication, the user’s client machine sends a request to the KDC  Authentication Service (AS) . The request includes details like the user’s username, and the date and time. All information except the username is encrypted using the hash of the user’s password. The KDC AS uses the username to look up its copy of the user’s password hash and uses it to decrypt the rest of the request. If the decryption is successful, that means the client used the correct password hash and the user has successfully authenticated. Once the user is authenticated, the KDC AS sends the user’s client a  ticket granting ticket   (TGT) . The TGT includes a unique session key and a timestamp that specifies how long that session is valid (normally 8 or 10 hours). Importantly, before sending the TGT, the KDC encrypts it using the password hash for a special account, the  KRBTGT account. ...

Checkpoint - Exporting Objects in CSV format

Be it a Network Operations Manager, Security Architect or a Security Auditor, the people up the hierarchy always harangue the Security Engineers to compile the list of firewall objects or rules or policies or the traffic statistics and so on.. This can turn out to be quite hectic especially if there are no built in features to systematically provide the output in a "layman-readable" format. Come, Checkpoint's "Object Explorer..."  which not only provides the output in the "layman-readable" format, but also provides in-built filtering mechanisms, thereby ensuring that the Security Engineer doesn't have to rely on Google for building his scarce Microsoft Excel data filtering skills. The following screenshots will show how easy it is, with Checkpoint R80.10 to generate the firewall configuration inventory. On the SmartConsole Unified Portal, navigate to Menu >> Open Object Explorer... Select the Categories you wish to see in your output: Click o...

MITRE ATT&CK - Tools, Attacks and Related - 1

MASSCAN - Mass IP port scanner https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan TeamTNT - Threat group that has primarily targeted cloud and containerized applications. The group has been active since at least Oct 2019 and has mainly focused its efforts on leveraging cloud and container resources to deploy cryptocurrency miners in victim environments. List of Techniques used by TeamTNT can be found here: https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0139/ Mimikatz - Is a credential dumper capable of obtaining plaintext Windows account logins and passwords, along with many other features that make it useful for testing the security of networks. Golden Ticket Attack - A golden ticket in Active Directory grants the bearer unlimited access. A golden ticket attack abuses the Kerberos protocol, which depends on the use of shared secrets to encrypt and sign messages. One of these secrets is known only to the Key Distribution Center (KDC): the password hash for the KRBTGT user, which is used to issue the Ke...