Static route configuration

It is important to understand the process of routing if you are interested in learning networking. One of the fundamental of this study is static routing. Static routing is not complicated, but it is the basic. We need to understand the basic in order to learn the advanced topics.

Static routing is the process of configuring network node with information necessary for successful packet forwarding. Routing table is constructed through manually entering routing information for every network that could be a destination.

An entire network can be configured using static route, but this is not fault tolerant especially if routing information has to be changed frequently. When there is a change in routing information, or network failure in any path in the network, network connectivity problem will occur. In this case, reconfiguration of static route manually to fix or repair the lost connectivity is required.
However, there are time when static route make sense in network setup. The default gateway setting in personal computer is one of this example.

To add a static IP route in your PC, simply open the command prompt and use the route add command. For example, to add a static route to the 192.168.25.0 network that uses a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, a gateway of 10.0.0.1, you type the following at a command prompt:

route add 192.168.25.0 mask 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.1

You may easily find the routing information in your PC by executing the following command.

route print

To configure static route in Cisco router, we need to use the "ip route" Cisco IOS command followed by the destination network, netmask and either the next hop IP address or the local exit network interface. For example, to enable routing traffic to the 192.168.25.0/24 subnet through the IP address 10.0.0.1:

conf t
ip route 192.168.25.0 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.1

where 255.255.255.0 is netmask in this case.