An OSPF area#

You will end up with an OSPF process participating in one area, advertising a network and forming adjacencies on the interfaces you name. FRR does the routing; Wheelhouse drives it through the configuration tree.

Before you start#

The operator role and a licence.
The area number, agreed with the other routers. Area 0 is the backbone, and a single-area design is area 0.
A router-id. Conventionally a loopback — a dummy interface gives you one that does not depend on a port being up.

Step 1 — Configure it#

Network → BGP / OSPF → Configure OSPF.

set protocols ospf parameters router-id 192.0.2.1
set protocols ospf area 0 network 192.0.2.0/24
set protocols ospf interface eth0 area 0

The panel offers areas 0, 1 and 2 in its select; other area numbers are valid OSPF and go in from the Config tree page or the console.

The area … network line says which prefixes belong to the area; the interface … area line says which interfaces speak OSPF. On a modern FRR the interface line is the one that forms adjacencies, and the page writes both because a design usually wants both.

Step 2 — Do not speak OSPF on the WAN#

An OSPF interface accepts adjacencies from whoever answers

Naming an internet-facing interface here invites anything on that segment to become a neighbour and inject routes. Name only the interfaces facing routers you control, and add passive interfaces for segments that should carry the prefix but form no adjacency:

set protocols ospf passive-interface eth0.20

Step 3 — Authenticate the adjacency, on anything shared#

If the segment carries anything that is not a router you control, configure authentication on both ends. Those nodes are not in the panel; add them from the config tree, and put them in the same commit as the interface so there is no window where the adjacency is open.

Step 4 — Let it through the firewall#

OSPF is IP protocol 89, addressed to multicast groups on the segment.

set firewall ipv4 input filter rule 91 action accept
set firewall ipv4 input filter rule 91 description 'ospf on the core segment'
set firewall ipv4 input filter rule 91 protocol ospf
set firewall ipv4 input filter rule 91 inbound-interface name eth0

Check it worked#

bash

show ip ospf neighbor
show ip ospf interface eth0
show ip route ospf

A neighbour stuck in ExStart or Exchange is almost always an MTU mismatch between the two interfaces; Init in one direction is a firewall or an authentication mismatch.

The BGP / OSPF page shows whether FRR is configured and renders the configuration as commands. Routes that arrived are on the Static routes page in the kernel column, without being in the declared column — which is what "learned, not configured" looks like there.

Undoing it#

delete protocols ospf