Pi OSPF Router

by Jim
Posted on November 29, 2014

This How-To project describes how to build a router that runs a dynamic routing protocol. I chose OSPF for this project, however other interior gateway protocols are becoming more popular, such as ISIS. To make this project go quicker, I used a previous Pi SD card build that already had support for a Wireless Access Point to make it easier to manage the Pi remotely. In that build we had installed the apache2 server, hostapd for Wi-Fi AP support, tftpd-hpa for tftp server, and the isc-dhcp-server to support the AP functions.
Lets get started.

Network Design

This router implementation was crafted to support a testbed where a router is needed to handle packet forwarding between multiple subnets on multiple network interfaces, and share routes with other routers that may be in the test bed. The Pi router terminates subnets on a Layer-2 switches and provides the packet forwarding between those networks and the Internet.

The production network requires multiple IP subnets – a management subnet, and three departmental subnets. The networks being used are as follows:

Directly Connected Networks

192.168.1.0 – The LAN side of the Firewall to the Internet

192.168.20.0/24 – The management network

10.1.3.0/24 – Sales Department

10.1.4.0/24 – Support Department

10.1.5.0/24 – The IT network

Pi Router eth0

192.168.1.x/24 – address assigned by DHCP from the ISP Router

Pi Router eth1

192.168.20.1/24 – Next hop for the management network

10.1.3.1/24 – Next hop for Sales network

10.1.4.1/24 – Next hop for Support network

Pi Router eth2

10.1.5.1/24 – Next hop for the IT network

Pi Router wlan0

192.168.10.1 – used as an AP for WiFi clients

Building the Router

First we need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces configuration file to include this information.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# ISP Connection
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# Termination of the Layer-2 sales and support networks 
auto eth1 eth1:0 eth1:1
iface eth1 inet static
  address 192.168.20.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0

iface eth1:0 inet static
  address 10.1.3.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0

iface eth1:1 inet static
  address 10.1.4.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0

# IT network
auto eth2
  iface eth2 inet static
  address 10.1.1.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0

Next we need to install the OSPF router application

sudo apt−get install quagga

Next we to enable the specific Quagga daemons we need by editing the daemons file.

sudo nano /etc/quagga/daemons

We want this file to have the following configuration lines set to “yes”.

zebra=yes
ospfd=yes

Next we need to configure Zebra, the routing package that Quagga is based on.

sudo nano /etc/quagga/zebra.conf

We need to modify this file to reflect the interfaces that routing will be used on. The IP addresses of those interfaces could be placed here in lieu of defining them in the /etc/network/interfaces file. The localhost interface (lo) has an IP address to be used as the router ID, which is used to facilitate the election process in a number of routing sub-functions.

!
password zebra
enable password password
!
interface eth0
link-detect
!
interface eth1
link-detect
!
interface eth2
link-detect
!
interface lo
link-detect
ip address 10.10.10.5/32
!
no log trap
log stdout
!
line vty
no login
!
no exec-timeout

Now we are ready to configure OSPFv2 routing. We do this by editing the /etc/quagga/ospfd.conf file. Make the contents of the file look like the following.hostname ospfd

hostname ospfd
!
password zebra
enable password password
!
interface eth0
!
interface eth1
!
interface eth2
!
interface lo
!
router ospf
network 192.168.1.0/24 area 0.0.0.0
network 10.1.1.0/24 area 0.0.0.0
network 10.1.3.0/24 area 0.0.0.0
network 10.1.4.0/24 area 0.0.0.0
network 10.10.10.5/32 area 0.0.0.0
network 192.168.10.0/24 area 0.0.0.0
network 192.168.20.0/24 area 0.0.0.0
!
line vty
no login
!
no exec-timeout

The last part of configuration is checking that we have IP forwarding turned on. This should be the case as we did that in the WAP setup. Edit the following file:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Find this line and remove the # character.

# Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv4
#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Save the file and then start the Quagga routing processes with the following command.

sudo /etc/init.d/quagga start

Verify the configuration

The zebra and ospf routing processes can be managed with a Cisco-like command line interface. Use telnet to connect to the console port of the specific routing process. Telnet is not part of the basic Raspbian build so you must install it.

sudo apt-get install telnet

The various Quagga routing processes use different TCP port numbers.

zebra – 2601
ripd – 2602
ripng – 2603
ospfd – 2604
bgpd – 2605
ospf6d – 2606

The follow is a quick capture of a session started to connect to the OSPF daemon.

telnet localhost 2604
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
Hello, this is Quagga (version 0.99.21).
Copyright 1996-2005 Kunihiro Ishiguro, et al.
ospfd>

There are many commands available in each routing daemon that allow you to configure the process. After saving the configuration, the results are stored in the relative configuration file under /etc/quagga/

In zebra:

show running-config

in ospfd:

show ip ospf neighbor
show ip ospf route
show ip ospf interface
show ip ospf database
show ip ospf border-routers

The Zebra process will automatically start upon reboot. If you want OSPF to start at boot, update the boot time scripts:

sudo update-rc.d quagga enable