Default Route

What is a Default Route

A Default Route (also known as the gateway of last resort) is a special type of static route. Where a static route specifies a path a router should use to reach a specific destination, a default route specifies a path the router should use if it doesn’t know how to reach the destination.
Default Route is the network route used by a router when there is no other known route exists for a given IP datagram's destination address. All the IP datagrams with unknown destination address are sent to the default route.

How to configure Default Routes

Default Route can be configured by the following IOS commands.
• Router(config)#ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 default_gateway [administrative_distance] [permanent]
OR
• Router(config)# ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 interface_to_exit [administrative_distance] [permanent]