Almost all of us know the difference between a static route and a dynamic one, longer match wins. If same length then AD decides and so on.
I have noticed that there are some misconceptions about the equivalent to ip route in multicast, the ip mroute command. One would assume that it works the same way as ip route but it does not.
First, when we are talking about multicast it is pretty much the opposite of regular routing since we care about the source of the packet instead of the destination. In multicast we check that incoming packets are coming in on the interface we would use to send traffic back to the source, the RPF check. It’s basically the same check that can be used for security reasons to avoid spoofing.
Sometimes we have assymmetric routing meaning that the source send traffic in on an interface we are not using to send traffic back to the source. This means we will have a RPF failure and traffic will be dropped. We can solve this by reconfiguring IGP or putting in a static mroute.
So many people think, “Oh I’ll just put in a mroute and traffic MAY come in that interface as well”. The error here is that mroute tells that traffic MUST come in on that interface. So it might not be the quick fix you thought it would be. Another common error is that you put a broad mask or a default route like 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0. In regular routing anything with a longer match would override the static default but with the mroute the default route takes precedence over IGP routes. The reason is that the AD is lower and the longest match does not apply here. So maybe you just had problems with one source before and now you have problems with all sources except for that one which you just fixed.
If you put several mroute statements in then longest match will apply since the AD will be the same. The easiest way of checking what interface is the RPF interface for a source is to use the show ip rpf command. This command will show what is the RPF interface and where the information was sourced from (IGP or static).
I hope this post has cleared some of the common misconceptions of the static mroute.