Juniper Juniper LabN Consulting LLC When an OSPF router undergoes restart, previous instances of LSAs belonging to that router may remain in the databases of other routers in the OSPF domain until such LSAs are aged out. Hence, when the restarting router joins the network again, neighboring routers re- establish adjacencies while the restarting router is still bringing- up its interfaces and adjacencies and generates LSAs with sequence numbers that may be lower than the stale LSAs. Such stale LSAs may be interpreted as bi-directional connectivity before the initial database exchanges are finished and genuine bi-directional LSA connectivity exists. Such incorrect interpretation may lead to, among other things, transient traffic packet drops. This document suggests improvements in the OSPF database exchange process to prevent such problems due to stale LSA utilization. The solution does not preclude changes in the existing standard but presents an extension that will prevent this scenario.