Adding a TCP/IP Route to the Windows Routing Table

The Routing table dictates where all packets go when they leave your system. On most environments, all packets that leave your system will be forwarded over to your router or hub, and from there out to the internet.

In some circumstances, you may have a testing network configured to duplicate another environment, or you may be configuring a more complex network topology that requires the use of additional routes. Adding routes to your machine is a useful testing tool for some of these situations.

Syntax:

route ADD xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx MASK xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Means:

route ADD “network” MASK “subnet mask”  “gateway ip”

For example, if you were on the 192.168.1.0 network, and you had a gateway on 192.168.1.12 configured to access the 10.10.10.0/24 network, you would use a route add statement like this:

route ADD 10.10.10.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.12

Your routing table should now reflect that change, and all traffic to the 10.10.10.x range will now be sent over to the gateway machine.

The route add change will only stick across reboots if you add it with the -p flag, as in the following:

route -p ADD 10.10.10.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.12

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This article was originally written on 09/13/06 Tagged with: Networking, Windows

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Comments (4)

1. July 30, 2007 9:48 pm
   wan

   I’ve a few question and Need help.
   1) Where is right place to put that network route statments on suse 9
   2) How to make auto route scripts so that, i don’t need to up manually this routing on suse9.

2. December 19, 2007 8:22 am
   Graham Allen

   Nice intro into adding static routes.
   Do you have any other articles on TCP/IP?
   If not, I have a detailed document that explains TCP/IP and routing I would be happy to email you to post on your site. I had to create this a while ago for training in my company.

3. September 17, 2008 5:18 pm
   Drowles

   I had to put the -p at the end in order to get the registry updated.
   All the help docs that I found show it at the beginning ?*&%??
   route ADD 10.10.10.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.12 -p

4. February 13, 2009 9:05 am
   camil7

   Thanks for the hint. Saved the day for a windows newbie

   By the way: removing routes (e.g. in case of typos) works as well as:

   route delete “network”

   e.g. to remove the route for 10.10.10.0 one types in

   route delete 10.10.10.0

   Ok, and “route help” even gives help, e.g. “route print” to show the routing table (actually the same output as “netstat -nr”)