this whole thing was my bad. i read that isisd needed to be started before zebra, tried to start it manually, and it was not on system `$PATH`. i should have trusted frr to just start the darned thing from `/usr/lib/frr` because it was in `/etc/frr/daemons`. r2# show isis database Area p1: IS-IS Level-2 link-state database: LSP ID PduLen SeqNumber Chksum Holdtime ATT/P/OL r1.dfw.00-00 185 0x00046bb4 0xb3dc 1193 0/0/0 r3.dfw.rg.net.00-00 * 122 0x00000010 0x9c53 973 0/0/0 r3.dfw.rg.net.02-00 * 73 0x00000006 0xedb3 935 0/0/0 r4.dfw.00-00 179 0x000001d9 0x37e6 950 0/0/0 r2.dfw.00-00 204 0x000467e1 0xbf7e 950 0/0/0 5 LSPs as i said, frr n00b here. apologies. randy