OSPF Neighbor Sim

Question

Refer to the topology. Your company has decided to connect the main office with three other remote branch offices using point-to-point serial links. You are required to troubleshoot and resolve OSPF neighbor adjacency issues between the main office and the routers located in the remote branch offices.

Instead of posting the output of “show run” commands we post here the commands entered on each router to reduce some useless lines. Also you can try solving questions by yourself before reading the answers.

Note: Packet Tracer does not support enabling OSPF under interface mode (ip ospf 3 area 0). We don’t know why such a popular command is not supported so we can’t make a pkt file for this lab.

Question 1

An OSPF neighbor adjacency is not formed between R3 in the main office and R4 in the Branch1 office. What is causing the problem?

A. There is an area ID mismatch.
B. There is a Layer 2 issue; an encapsulation mismatch on serial links.
C. There is an OSPF hello and dead interval mismatch.
D. The R3 router ID is configured on R4.

Answer: A

Explanation

We learned it is a OSPF problem so we should check the interfaces between them first. On both R3 and R4 use “show running-config” command to check their S1/0 interfaces

In the output above we see their Area IDs are mismatched; interface S1/0 of R3 is in area 0 (R3: ip ospf 3 area 0) while interface s1/0 of R4 is in area 2 (R4: ip ospf 4 area 2).

Question 2

An OSPF neighbor adjacency is not formed between R3 in the main office and R5 in the Branch2 office. What is causing the problem?

A. There is an area ID mismatch.
B. There is a PPP authentication issue; a password mismatch.
C. There is an OSPF hello and dead interval mismatch.
D. There is a missing network command in the OSPF process on R5.

Answer: C

Explanation

Continue checking their connected interfaces with the “show running-config” command:

The only difference we can see here is the line “ip ospf hello-interval 50″ on R3. This command sets the number of seconds R3 waits before sending the next hello packet out this interface. In this case after configuring this command, R3 will send hello packets to R5 every 50 seconds. But the default value of hello-interval is 10 seconds and R5 is using it. Therefore we can think of a hello interval mismatch problem here. You can verify with the “show ip ospf interface <interface>” command on each router.

So we can see both hello and dead interval are mismatched because the dead interval always four times the value of hello interval, unless you manually configure the dead interval (with the ip ospf dead-interval <seconds> command).

Question 3

R1 does not form an OSPF neighbor adjacency with R2. Which option would fix the issue?

A. R1 ethernet0/1 is shutdown. Configure no shutdown command.
B. R1 ethernet0/1 configured with a non-default OSPF hello interval of 25; configure no ip ospf hello-interval 25
C. R2 ethernet0/1 and R3 ethernet0/0 are configured with a non-default OSPF hello interval of 25; configure no ip ospf hello-interval 25
D. Enable OSPF for R1 ethernet0/1; configure ip ospf 1 area 0 command under ethernet0/1

Answer: B

Explanation

Continue checking their connected interfaces with the “show running-config” command:

We see the hello interval on R1 is not the same as R2 (and you can verify with the “show ip ospf interface <interface> command”) -> There is a hello and dead interval mismatch problem. We should configure “no ip ospf hello-interval 25″ on R1.

Note: Maybe there are some versions of this question in the exam. For example there are some reports saying that Ethernet0/1 on R1 is shutdown (and this is the correct choice in the exam). So please be careful checking the config on the routers before choosing the correct answers.

Question 4

An OSPF neighbor adjacency is not formed between R3 in the main office and R6 in the Branch3 office. What is causing the problem?

A. There is an area ID mismatch.
B. There is a PPP authentication issue; the username is not configured on R3 and R6.
C. There is an OSPF hello and dead interval mismatch.
D. The R3 router ID is configured on R6.

Answer: D

Explanation

We are not sure about the configuration of ppp authentication in this case. Some reports said that only one router has the “ppp authentication chap” command but it is just a trick and is not the problem here. The real problem here is R6 uses the same router-id of R3 (192.168.3.3) so OSPF neighborship cannot be established. In real life, such configuration error will be shown in the command line interface (CLI). So please check carefully for this question.