Floating Static Routes

Floating routes, are we levitating our routers now?

Say you have a primary route, using a routing protocol such as OSPF and you want to input a manual static backup route. Well, the administrative distance of a static route is always 1, so your backup route would always be chosen over the primary OSPF route which has an administrative distance of 110.

Floating static routes are when you manually set the administrative distance of a static route to be higher than your routing protocol. This way the route "floats" above the primary route until that route goes down, only then will the static route be entered into your routing table. Simple concept with a fancy name.

Enter your static route with the command:

ip route [destination net] [subnet] [next hop] [Admin Distance]
ip route 172.16.1.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 112

Notice the administrative distance I chose was 112, higher than OSPF's 110, so that the OSPF route will be used while it is active. You can choose any admin distance up to 255.