EIGRP and Default Routes

jengels@communitycoffee.com 3 posts since Nov 2, 2008 EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 3, 2013 1:23 PM

Hey guys,

I know there are several ways to skin a cat but wanted to get some thoughts on the solution below:

I wanted to get some of your takes on if this is a legitimate way to advertise a default route into EIGRP. I have seen many folks do different variations but after some testing I landed on the following. It seems to work in my lab. I am using a default route to Null0 on my core router so that EIGRP will advertise network 0.0.0.0.

CoreRouter Config router eigrp 1 network 10.0.1.0 0.0.0.3 network 172.25.1.0 0.0.0.3 network 172.30.1.0 0.0.0.3 network 192.168.1.0 network 0.0.0.0 no auto-summary ! ip forward-protocol nd

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ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 Null0 ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.0.1.1

My understanding: Null0's Administrative Distance is 255 so it is never used for routing in this case as the 10.0.1.1 route is an AD of 1. The Null0 route is only used to **** EIGRP into advertising the 0.0.0.0 network. This is so that I don't have to specify and interface on my next hop for 10.0.1.1. I prefer to use the IP so that in the event of a failure, my standby ASA will take over IP 10.0.1.1.

My thought process: I prefer not to "redistribute static" due to some other static routes that I do not want to redistribute for some VPN stuff which I won't go into here. The other option was to use a route-map in the redistribute statement but being the Null0 setup was so easy and seems to work I wanted to see if this is a legitimate way to install a default-route. (I also am aware and familiar with the "default-network" command but wanted to try this first before adding another subnet to the mix)

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

John E. Heyer 23 posts since Jan 13, 2009 1. on page 2 Re: EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 3, 2013 1:36 PM

Main caveat I can foresee is always advertising a default route even when the default route is unreable. I avoid using "default-information originate always" in OSPF for the same reason.

jengels@communitycoffee.com 3 posts since Nov 2, 2008

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2. on page 2 Re: EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 3, 2013 1:48 PM in response to John E. Heyer

Yeah, that is one angle I did think about. So help me think through this:

Here are my thoughts on that angle: Thinking about a situation where the true default route would go down; In the situation where the device or subnet containing 10.0.1.1 died (became non-existent, in my case the ASA) then I would still be advertising a default route as you said above. So at this point all default route traffic would still be directed to the core of my network:

Would this be a bad thing? My initial thought is: My gateway of last resort is down at this point so does it matter that all my traffic is directed to the Core and then dropped or is there some other impact I am not thinking about?

(I will have and Active and Standby ASA, hence the reason for using the Null0 and IP 10.0.1.1 idea)

John E. Heyer 23 posts since Jan 13, 2009 3. on page 3 Re: EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 3, 2013 4:04 PM in response to jengels@communitycoffee.com

Do you ony have a single core router? Or is this a pair?

rboldy 191 posts since Jun 3, 2011 4. on page 3 Re: EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 3, 2013 7:31 PM in response to jengels@communitycoffee.com

If you don't have another way out your network there's no technical reason that it would be bad for this traffic to be null routed at egress point so long as you plan for the bandwidth and extra load to process and discard these packets. You may see an increase here due to TCP retransmissions so make sure you have some head-room. In your case so long as you're running at less than 60% utilization on bandwidth and 40-50% average on CPU/memory it's a good idea to do this because a traceroute will stop at the place where the issue exisits i.e. at the router that has lost it's default-route. This makes troubleshooting a lot easier.

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EIGRP and Default Routes

Now, the only issue you may come across is if you lost other (more-specific) routes in your internal network. Then the traceroute would take the default path and may cause some confusion because it might be that traffic should never usually go there. This could lead to wasted time looking at the router when infact it's something else that stopping this more specific route closer to the affected device. However you'll have this problem regardless of how you inject a default-route so long as you have one.

Brian 2,964 posts since Aug 17, 2009 5. on page 4 Re: EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 3, 2013 10:43 PM

the null 0 route does not have an AD of 255, unless you set it manually. i do not see that you did this. Also, since you are using the "network 0.0.0.0" command you are enabling EIGRP on "all" interfaces. this may or may not be problem depending on what others interface are configured and whether you want EIGRP to be running on those interfaces.

the proper way is to use a default route and redistribute into EIGRP. use a route map and call an ip prefix-list to allow only the default route. like so

ip prefix-list DEFAULT seq 5 permit 0.0.0.0/0 ! route-map DEFAULT_ONLY permit 10 match ip address prefix-list DEFAULT !

HTH

Brian

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Adeel 180 posts since Apr 19, 2011 6. on page 5 Re: EIGRP and Default Routes Sep 4, 2013 4:09 PM in response to Brian

Brian very well explained.

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