10.1 Routing Design

nhrpd never handles routing of prefixes itself. You need to run some real routing protocol (e.g. BGP) to advertise routes over the tunnels. What nhrpd does it establishes ’shortcut routes’ that optimizes the routing protocol to avoid going through extra nodes in NBMA GRE mesh.

nhrpd does route NHRP domain addresses individually using per-host prefixes. This is similar to Cisco FlexVPN; but in contrast to opennhrp which uses a generic subnet route.

To create NBMA GRE tunnel you might use the following (linux terminal commands):

 ip tunnel add gre1 mode gre key 42 ttl 64
 ip addr add 10.255.255.2/32 dev gre1
 ip link set gre1 up

Note that the IP-address is assigned as host prefix to gre1. nhrpd will automatically create additional host routes pointing to gre1 when a connection with these hosts is established.

The gre1 subnet prefix should be announced by routing protocol from the hub nodes (e.g. BGP ’network’ announce). This allows the routing protocol to decide which is the closest hub and determine the relay hub on prefix basis when direct tunnel is not established.

nhrpd will redistribute directly connected neighbors to zebra. Within hub nodes, these routes should be internally redistributed using some routing protocol (e.g. iBGP) to allow hubs to be able to relay all traffic.

This can be achieved in hubs with the following bgp configuration (network command defines the GRE subnet):

router bgp 65555
   network 172.16.0.0/16
   redistribute nhrp