Override kernel interface prefix length for OSPF

[Nodar Nutsubidze]

Hello!

I need a way to override how the OSPF protocol sees a device interface. I
had an interface which had a peer address (/32) but I needed it to be able
to communicate with an upstream OSPF router which was set as (/24)
communicating via broadcast and expecting a larger mask. While it is of
course possible to modify the upstream OSPF router to act as PTP this was
not possible in my situation.

So essentially I needed to override the /32 on an interface to behave as
/24 and for it to communicate in the broadcast type. In my case the
interface had to remain /32 so changing it to /24 manually was not a viable
option.  I looked at *ptp netmask* but all that did was send up /32 instead
of /0 as part of the hello packets.

Has this ever come up as a request? If not then this is how I got around
this issue.  Let me know your thoughts. I added a configuration option into
the device protocol to support a list of interface patterns which if
matched will override the prefix to what is passed in. The
sysdep/linux/netlink.c then looks for an interface match and modifies the
pxlen to be the real prefix that is configured. This resulted in the OSPF
protocol seeing the device as broadcast and /24 instead of p2p.

I also have some basic questions:

   - Where are your bugs/issues maintained? Bugzilla? Mantis? ...
      - I say this because there is a TODO in the code but would expect
      this in a issue tracking system.
   - Is there a list of tests that your team goes through before you
   release a version and if so where are they defined so that I can run
   through them before I push up a patch. I've done basic OSPF tests with the
   associated patch as well as valgrind leak checks.

Thank you very much!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://trubka.network.cz/pipermail/bird-users/attachments/20161110/91f01029/attachment.html>