EIGRP Default Network Route

Hello Minghui

When you use an Ethernet port as an exit interface, what will happen depends on several factors including the IOS version and the platform that you are using. In some platforms/IOS combinations, what Rene has implemented will work as configured. However, there are some other situations in which it doesn’t. The following link shows a couple of examples where you have an IP address as a next hop IP or an interface as an exit interface. In this example, the use of an exit interface fails.

If you configure a static route using an Ethernet exit interface, the forwarding router will assume the destination device is directly connected to that interface and it will try to find the MAC address of the destination by sending an ARP request out of the interface to the destination address. If it is successful, routing will occur successfully.

If you attempt to advertise the 0.0.0.0 network with a default routing using a next hop address, EIGRP will not directly advertise the 0.0.0.0 network. Rene mentions this in his notes:


As Rene mentions, if you don’t use this method, you can use redistribution to redistribute static routes into EIGRP. More on redistribution can be found here:

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz