Newbie trying to play around with bird. I have a setup with tap interfaces and when I do a ifconfig , the interfaces are up and running. However from BIRD's documentation : The interface module keeps a `soft-up' state for each *iface* which is a conjunction of link being up, the interface being of a `sane' type and at least one IP address assigned to it. There is no - ip adress assigned and I have a custom forwarding plane that uses the interfaces and some smarts to tie them up into interface group and etc. Is there a work around to treat these interfaces as "UP" using the config (I mean it should just look for link up and admin up flags ? ) and have ospf protocol use them to import/export routes. I am avoiding attaching dummy addresses. Tried reading documentation and some older threads but could not find relevant info. -- Jigar Mehta