An engineer runs a route lookup on a co-op's core router and sees two entries for the same downstream /24, but only one of them is marked as the route Junos is actually using to forward subscriber traffic right now. What is that in-use route called?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Out of every path Junos knows about to a destination, only one gets the spotlight at a time — that's the active route, the one actually steering packets. Everything else to that same destination sits on the bench, ready but unused.
Full Explanation
When multiple routes exist in the routing table for the same destination, Junos marks exactly one of them as the active route: the route it selected (based on preference and, within a protocol, metric) to actually install in the forwarding table and use for traffic. A 'candidate route' isn't Junos terminology for a routing-table entry at all — it's the staged configuration a user is editing before a commit, an entirely different concept. A 'rescue configuration' is a saved, known-good configuration snapshot an administrator can roll back to during recovery; it has nothing to do with route selection. A 'default route' refers to the catch-all 0.0.0.0/0 route matching any destination with no more specific match — a description of a route's scope, not of whether it's currently in use. Only the active route actually forwards traffic; any other route to the same prefix remains in the routing table as inactive, ready to take over if the active one is withdrawn. A concrete check is show route <prefix>, where Junos flags the selected path with an asterisk next to the protocol name, distinguishing it from any inactive alternatives listed below it.