EIGRP OTP

While I was at Cisco Live last summer, I sat through a presentation on some new features of EIGRP by Donnie Savage.  The one that immediately caught my attention as something that could be very cool for simplifying routing over tactical satellite links is OTP (Over the Top Protocol). The very quick synapsis is that EIGRP OTP allows you to form a neighbor adjacency without being directly connected and without having to manually setup tunnels. I immediately thought of SWAN/VSAT or WPPL configs. I don’t think DMVPN configs are prohibitively complicated, but I certainly recognize that with the current knowledge levels and the way gear is being procured and fielded, simplification is the best thing we can do for our Marines.

Instead of the NHRP servers that serve as a DMVPN hubs, OTP allows you to use route-reflector servers to serve a similar function.  DMVPN gives you the ability to encrypt where that is not done by OTP, but with the recent advances in our TDMA and FDMA modems, we are no longer limited to using router-based encryption or other hardware encryptors.

I did attempt this on our newly fielded 3945s inside the WSM, but at that time (late summer ’14) the IOS with them was not new enough.  I have since played around with the configs in VIRL and it is pretty simple.  The Cisco doc covering the configs is here.  When I get my hands on some gear, I plan on re-visiting this with some example configurations for you to play around with.  If you end up giving it a try, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought.