When reading (or being lectured about ) all the glorious details of dynamic routing protocols, it's hard not
to come away with the impression that dynamic routing is always better than static routing. It's important
to keep in mind that the primary duty of a dynamic routing protocol is to automatically detect and adapt to
topological changes in the internetwork. The price of this "automation" is paid in bandwidth and maybe
queue space, in memory, and in processing time.
A frequent objection to static routing is that it is hard to administer. This criticism may be true of medium
to large topologies with many alternative routes, but it is certainly not true of small internetworks with
few or no alternative routes.
The internetwork in Figure 4.14 has a hub-and-spoke topology popular in smaller internetworks. If a
spoke to any router breaks, is there another route for a dynamic routing protocol to choose? This
internetwork is an ideal candidate for static routing. Configure one static route in the hub router for each
spoke router and a single default route in each spoke router pointing to the hub, and the internetwork is
ready to go. (Default routes are covered in Chapter 12, "Default Routes and On-Demand Routing." )