EIGRP Router ID
Each EIGRP router has a unique 32-bit router ID (RID) number that is represented the same
way as an IP address.
EIGRP automatically selects the highest IP address on any active loopback interface as the
router ID. If there is no loopback interface then the highest IP address on any active interface
is used. You can also overrule this by manually setting the router ID.
Even though each router should have a unique router ID, it doesn’t matter all that much. Two
EIGRP routers with the same router ID will still form a neighbor adjacency. When we use
OSPF, the router ID is important to know if you are digging in the OSPF LSDB. When we
use EIGRP we don’t really care about the router ID, you don’t need to know it if you are
looking at the topology table.
There is one exception to this, when an EIGRP router receives an external route (redistributed
route) from a neighbor that has the same router ID then it will not accept it. This is an
interesting scenario for a troubleshooting lab so let’s take a closer look at it.
Configuration
To demonstrate this, I’ll use the following two routers:
We only need two routers for this. R2 has a loopback interface that we will redistribute in
EIGRP. Let’s look at a “normal” scenario first where we have unique router IDs.
EIGRP Unique router IDs
Let’s start with the EIGRP configuration:
R1(config)#router eigrp 12
R1(config-router)#no auto-summary
R1(config-router)#network [Link]
R2(config)#router eigrp 12
R2(config-router)#no auto-summary
R2(config-router)#network [Link]
R2(config-router)#redistribute connected metric 1 1 1 1 1
Let’s check the router IDs of these routers:
R1#show ip eigrp topology | include ID
IP-EIGRP Topology Table for AS(12)/ID([Link])
R2#show ip eigrp topology | include ID
IP-EIGRP Topology Table for AS(12)/ID([Link])
R1 is using the IP address on its FastEthernet interface as the router ID, R2 is using the one
on its loopback interface. Let’s verify that R1 has learned network [Link] /24:
R1#show ip route eigrp
[Link]/24 is subnetted, 1 subnets
D EX [Link] [170/2560025856] via [Link], 00:04:52,
FastEthernet0/0
There it is as expected. This is how it should work…now let’s mess things up by using a
duplicate router ID!
EIGRP Duplicate router IDs
Let’s change the router ID of R2 so that it’s the same as the one on R1:
R2(config)#router eigrp 12
R2(config-router)#eigrp router-id [Link]
R2#show ip eigrp topology
IP-EIGRP Topology Table for AS(12)/ID([Link])
R2#clear ip eigrp neighbors
Even though the router ID is the same, our routers will still become neighbors:
R1#show ip eigrp neighbors
IP-EIGRP neighbors for process 12
H Address Interface Hold Uptime SRTT RTO Q
Seq
(sec) (ms) Cnt
Num
0 [Link] Fa0/0 14 00:00:05 73 438 0 25
Unfortunately R1 no longer has network [Link] /24 in its topology or routing table:
R1#show ip eigrp topology
IP-EIGRP Topology Table for AS(12)/ID([Link])
Codes: P - Passive, A - Active, U - Update, Q - Query, R - Reply,
r - reply Status, s - sia Status
P [Link]/24, 1 successors, FD is 281600
via Connected, FastEthernet0/0
R1#show ip route eigrp
This issue might be hard to spot. You could check all the router IDs by looking at the EIGRP
topology table of each router but if you don’t have access to the router that is doing the
redistribution then you are out of luck. Maybe a debug will help?
R1#debug ip eigrp
IP-EIGRP Route Events debugging is on
R1#clear ip eigrp neighbors
IP-EIGRP(Default-IP-Routing-Table:12): Processing incoming UPDATE packet
IP-EIGRP(Default-IP-Routing-Table:12): ExtS [Link]/24 M 2560025856 -
2560000000 25856 SM 2560000256 - 2560000000 256
Our debug tells us that we receive [Link] /24 so this doesn’t help us, everything looks ok
here. There is one hidden command however that will give us the answer:
R1#show ip eigrp ?
<1-65535> Autonomous System
accounting IP-EIGRP Accounting
interfaces IP-EIGRP interfaces
neighbors IP-EIGRP neighbors
topology IP-EIGRP Topology Table
traffic IP-EIGRP Traffic Statistics
vrf Select a VPN Routing/Forwarding instance
R1#show ip eigrp events
Event information for AS 12:
1 01:03:12.263 Ignored route, metric: [Link]/24 2560025856
2 01:03:12.263 Ignored route, neighbor info: [Link]
FastEthernet0/1
3 01:03:12.263 Ignored route, dup router: [Link]
The show ip eigrp events command doesn’t show up in the show ip eigrp overview. When
you use it it will show you a history of events, including the route that is ignored.
The output above tells us that [Link] is the duplicate router ID. You can use this to
change the router ID on R1 to fix the problem…
Want to take a look for yourself? Here you will find the configuration of each device.
That’s all there is to it, I hope this example of the EIGRP router ID has been useful. If you
have any questions, just leave a comment!