Not-so-stubby area

A not-so-stubby-area (NSSA) is an OSPFv3 area that provides the benefits of stub areas with the extra capability of importing external route information. OSPFv3 does not flood external routes from other areas into an NSSA, but does translate and flood route information from the NSSA into other areas such as the backbone.

NSSAs are especially useful when you want to aggregate type 5 External LSAs (external routes) before forwarding them into an OSPFv3 area. When you configure an NSSA, you can specify an address range for aggregating the external routes that the ABR of the NSSAs exports into other areas.

If the router is an ABR, you can prevent any type 3 and type 4 LSA from being injected into the area by configuring a nssa with the no-summary parameter. The only exception is that a default route is injected into the NSSA by the ABR, and strictly as a type 3 LSA. The default type 7 LSA is not originated in this case.

By default, the device's NSSA translator role is set to candidate and the router participates in NSSA translation election, if it is an ABR. You can also configure the NSSA translator role.

In the case where an NSSA ABR is also an ASBR, the default behavior is that it originates type 5 LSAs into normal areas and type 7 LSAs into an NSSA. But you can prevent an NSSA ABR from generating type 7 LSAs into an NSSA by configuring the no-redistribution parameter.