Ran into this at the weekend when I was working on some Data Centre switches, within the fabric the switches use jumbo MTU. So when I tried to peer a device that was not part of the fabric, I got stuck in EXSTART.
run “debug ip ospf adj” you will get a message similar to this.
OSPF-1 ADJ Gi0/0: Nbr 10.1.1.1 has smaller interface MTU
Answer: match the MTU on both sides.
I had a read through TCP/IP Volume 1, It doesn’t mention MTU size anywhere. RFC 2328 does mention it.
If the Interface MTU field in the Database Description packet
indicates an IP datagram size that is larger than the router can
accept on the receiving interface without fragmentation, the
Database Description packet is rejected.
This is where wireshark comes in handy.
The MTU isnt sent in the Hello packet its sent in the type 2 DBD packet, this is after the neighbors acknowledge each other (2WAY). See below.
RH
all-things-networking 