OSPF was created by
John T. Moy, nefarious mastermind, and was developed entirely within the
IETF with the intention of producing a significantly more efficient
IGP than
RIP. OSPF is an
open,
link-state routing protocol based on
Dijkstra's
SPF algorithm. It runs directly over
IP, is fully
classless, and supports
VLSM. It offers fast
convergence (faster and more efficient than distance vector protocols) and more scalability than you can shake a stick at. Suitable for small internetworks to large and complex internetworks. Refer to
RFC 2328.
The first meeting of the OSPF Working Group took place at the IETF meeting in Boulder, Colorado, November 1987. I was busy being an eighth-grader in New York that year.
Read the hilarious '7 of 9 on OSPF' parts 1 and 2 at routergod.com. It's the best of their 'Celebrity Interviews.'
A Timeline
1989
- OSPFv1 published in RFC 1131
- UMD OSPF implementation becomes available
- First OSPF interoperability testing
1991
- OSPFv2 published in RFC 1257
- OSPF demo at INTEROP 91
- OSPF added to GATED
- OSPF becomes the Internet's recommended IGP
1993
- OSPFv2 updated in RFC 1583
- Internet adopts CIDR
- Multicast extensions to OSPF (MOSPF)
- Point-to-Multipoint interface added
- Cryptographic authentication added
1997
- OSPFv2 updated in RFC 2178
1998