IS-IS, or Intermediate System to Intermediate System. Just like OSPF, it’s a link-state routing protocol. This article took me quite a bit of research, and things were confusing for me at first because I kept looking at it from an OSPF point of view. Now that I’ve cleared that up for myself, I’ll do my best to explain it here for people knowing OSPF but not IS-IS (which, I assume, will be the majority of readers here).

First some explanation about why one would want to use IS-IS in the first place. After all, both are link-state routing protocols and OSPF is much more familiar to most. However, there are a few key differences in design of the protocols. But the most important reason to choose IS-IS over OSPF is scalability. IS-IS scales to larger topologies compared to OSPF using the same resources. A general recommendation for the number of OSPF routers in an area is between 70 and 100 maximum, while IS-IS will do 150 routers in an area (of course, the number of uplinks, routes and type of routers will influence this number). The difference in multi-area design can also make IS-IS more suitable for some topologies (which I will explain in part II later on).

This part will focus on a single area and basic configuration. It is useful to know some historical facts which explain the difference in commands compared to OSPF.

  • Since IS-IS wasn’t designed with IP in mind but CLNS, it works directly on layer 2 with no IP headers. It uses flexible TLV (Type-Length-Value) fields in the PDUs it exchanges which makes it suitable for carrying routing information of just about any protocol. This is why it’s also used for IPv6 and even TRILL and FabricPath (which is actually nothing more than exchanging the location of MAC addresses by routing protocol).
  • IS-IS has a concept of areas but refers to it as ‘levels’. On a Cisco router the IS-IS routing protocol will try to form neighborships for both level 1 and level 2 by default. When using just one area, it’s best to configure the routing protocol to form neighborship of level 1 only (again, multi-area will be covered in part II).
  • A Network Entitity Title (NET) is used to identify a router. It is made up of four parts: the first byte is an Authority and Format Identifier (AFI),  next two bytes that define the area, followed by six bytes that act as a unique identifier (much like an OSPF router-id) and one byte for n-selector (NSEL). This NSEL is always set to zero for IS-IS for IP (non-zero values are used for actual data transport over CLNS, which likely isn’t used anywhere anymore). The AFI must be officially registered but 49 can be used for internal addressing.
  • As a consequence, the first six bytes (AFI and area ID) have to be the same for all IS-IS routers in an area, and the following six bytes have to be unique for each IS-IS router in an area.
  • For the unique ID part, several methods exist: you can use the system base MAC address, map an IP address to it, or simply start counting from 1 and up.

ISIS-NET

Given all the above, the basic IS-IS routing process can be configured as following:

Router(config)#router isis
Router(config-router)#log-adjacency-changes
Router(config-router)#is-type level-1
Router(config-router)#net 49.0001.0000.0000.0017.00

Unlike the other routing protocols, logging of adjacencies is not on by default on a Cisco router.

Now that the process is configured, interfaces must be added to it. That’s right, interfaces, no ‘network’ command to define subnets. This can be done in two ways:

  • Configuring an IP address on an interface, followed by the ‘ip router isis’ command will make the interface participate.
  • Configuring an IP address on an interface and defining that interface as passive in the router process will make IS-IS announce the subnet on the attached interface but not form any neighborships on it. The ‘ip router isis’ command is not required.

Router(config)#interface GigabitEthernet0/1
Router(config-int)#ip address 10.0.2.1 255.255.255.252
Router(config-int)#ip router isis
Router(config-int)#exit
Router(config)#interface Loopback0
Router(config-int)#ip address 10.0.10.14 255.255.255.255
Router(config-int)#exit
Router(config)#router isis
Router(config-router)#passive-interface Loopback0

And that’s it. Configure this on two adjacent routers and an IS-IS neighborship will form. You can check this using ‘show clns neighbors’ and ‘show isis neighbors’.

ISIS-Show

In upcoming parts, I’ll explain multi-area design and configuration and fine tuning of the default parameters. And for those interested, I’ve uploaded a capture of the IS-IS neighborship forming on Cloudshark.

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