Using GUI for static routing?

earweed

I was looking over an article in Claymoore's sticky for the 70-642 exam last week and this kind of stuck in my head. It's from How to configure Windows 2008 Server IP Routing

Static routing in Windows Server is nothing new. We have been using the route command for years. You can configure static routing in Windows 2008 Server using either the route command or using the GUI. However, if you use the Windows GUI interface, those routes will not be listed in the CLI interface, when you type route print. Thus, I highly recommend that if you are going to use static routing in Windows 2008, you just use the route command at the windows command prompt.

I was wondering why doing a static route with the GUI would do this. The author never really went into any detail of why a GUI entered static route would not be listed when you later did route print. Does the GUI write the static route to a different location or something than what is written to when you add the static route with the cli?

Devilsbane

This is actually the same situation with server 2003. Really the moral of the story is to either use the GUI or to use the command prompt, but not both.

It you configure static routes in the GUI they will be displayed in the GUI as static routes. They will also be displayed by using the route print command, but they don't get separated and marked as persistant.

If you add your routes via the command, they won't show up in the GUI as static routes, but they are separated in a separate section of the output of the route print command.

So pick which one you like more, and use that one. It will cut down on the headaches later. Most of your routing will probably be done using a protocol anyway, so you shouldn't have dozens of static routes.