Friday, January 20, 2012

Short note on OSPF LSDB and RIB

The fact is

RIP's RIB = rip database = "show ip rip database"
EIGRP's RIB = topology table = "show ip eigrp topology"
BGP's RIB = bgp rib (?) = "show ip bgp"

Thats why many think that OSPF's RIB is the ospf database i.e LSDB but this isn't true. Here is the fact why

LSDB is not considered as RIB for ospf because it contains entire topolgy information in the form of LSAs and network reachability is merely an attribute of the LSA. However the network reachability information can be derivered from the LSAs stored in the LSDB, now since ospf does not have its own RIB like other routing protocols to store its routing information so ospf uses main routing table for this purpose and from there ospf generate summary LSAs type 3 or 4 etc..