this is my fear. which is why i asked. pushing out new configs (the canonic config is on disk, not the router [0]) and setting a reload of a bunch of routers at time t0 does not give me warm fuzzies about what the world will be like at time tn (n > 0).
but i may have to take that path. i am hoping folk will give me a magic pill. after all, any group with such a deep understanding of how to deal with the world's social ills must know a bit of router magic <smirk>.
I think with OSPF this will be very difficult to do without rebooting (or as long an outage as rebooting). We migrated from OSPF to IS-IS and changed some loopbacks a while ago, the IS-IS change was totally transparent - no issue, but on the change of loopback caused a lot of BGP churn. It was easier to change it and reboot and do it over a period of time in small network triangles. I always thought that the billing system was the database of record ;-) Neil.