Ospf inter-area routes ignored

RouterOS
1

It seems that routeros does ignore inter-area routes if the router is not a area border router and not connected to area 0.0.0.0

a temporary workaround is to create a virtual link to a area border router, but that makes this router also a area border router and as such has much more routes installed (else only summary lsa would be installed)

I checked how other implementation behave (bird3), and as expected, bird installes inter-area routes.

This bug seems to exists since at least 7.20, a beta of 7.21 broke also the virtual router workaround.

What I’m not quite sure is if mikrotik developers think non backbone router should not install inter-area routes (that would make no sense)

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2328 section 4.1 does not mention that inter-area routes (essentially summary lsa) should be ignored.

2

Replying to myself: Turns out you must not define area 0.0.0.0 altogether on the “non” backbone router. it is not enough that no interface/link belongs to area 0.0.0.0/backbone.

The error remains on ipv6/ospfv3 tough. This instance needed a disable/enable, as it did not self-heal