Soft reset command for ospf

[Horacio Gutierrez]

Hello, I seen a soft reset for bgp and eigrp for to have peer advertise routes. Does ospf have a soft reset or it doesn't and if so why? Thanks,

[Richard Burts]

As far as I know there is not a soft reset for a neighbor in OSPF. There are probably multiple reasons why this is not implemented in OSPF and I will suggest two reasons:

- with the periodic LSA refresh in OSPF there is already a mechanism that will provide an update to make sure that you have the most current routing information from your neighbor and therefore there is not any good reason to request that the neighbor retransmit its update information.

- with BGP and to some extent with EIGRP you can apply policy (filters, distribute lists, etc) that can affect what you will accept from a neighbor and perhaps how you will process it. So if you have changed your configuration in a way that impacts what or how you will process its updates it makes sense to have a mechanism that will request that the neighbor send current updates. However OSPF is a link state protocol and part of being link state is a requirement that your copy of the Link State Database be exactly the same as your other neighbors in that area. So you do not have differential policy on routing updates in OSPF and therefore no need to trigger a new set up updates from your OSPF neighbor.

HTH

Rick

[mscott21]

for the record, you do need to do a reset if you manually change ospf priority values at the interface config level in order to set the DR or BDR.  Specifically, 

clear ip ospf process

However, this resets the OSPF state on all interfaces under the OSPF process so it is not "soft".  Therefore, it might be less disruptive to "shut", wait a few seconds, and then "no shut" the relevant interfaces.