What is a static route?

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We talk about static routes when we have multiple routers in our environment and it is typically used for larger organizations that have data centers they replicate to or remote sites that connect back to head office.

In my scenario in my office , we have a default route set on the core switch which points to the firewall, the firewall then decides what traffic is destined for the internet and the rest of the traffic is sent to the core to decide the destinations or vlans internally that it should forward traffic to.

This is a simple concept of how static route works and this ties heavily into the routing topic which is much more broader than this and understanding this now can lead to careers in routing which gets a little more complex and have dedicated study units dedicated to explaining this topic.

Looking at the above pic , I will explain how it works, the destination can be one address or a subnet depending on your needs, the mask defines whether it is a single address or an entire subnet, 255.55.255.255 means that it is a single address and 255.255.255.0 is an entire subnet. To understand this better you would need to understand the topic "subnetting" which we will cover later on.

The hop refers to the router so the next hop refers to the immediate router that the traffic should traverse.

Any questions regarding the diagram can be asked in comments.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,
@trev03