[nsp] maximum OSPF metric

[Tom Holbrook]

Rainer-

Here's my understanding: Link costs for individual intra-area LSAs are 
represented by a 16 bit unsigned integer which gives an upper bound of 
2^16-1 (65535). The OSPF standard poses no limit on intra-area total path 
metric, though metrics of inter-area summary and external paths are limited 
by space in those LSAs of 24 bits, giving you max metric 
2^24-1(16,777,215). Most implementations (including JunOS and IOS) are 
using 32 bit unsigned for total path cost, which gives you 2^32-1 
(4,294,967,295)

-Tom

At 09:40 PM 1/9/2003 +0100, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>ok, the cost of each link must be <= 65535. But reading rfc2328 and
>searching cisco.com I couldn't figure out how large the sum of all costs
>(metric) for a path may get. I *guess* this might depend on the routing
>platform.
>
>Does anybody have an Idea what size did cisco reserve for the metric?
>Is there another place I should have looked at before posting?
>
>Rainer
>
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__________________
Tom Holbrook
Sr. Network Engineer
Earthlink - Atlanta

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