A NOC technician at a regional ISP notices a static route to a backup POP still listed under show route even though OSPF is currently supplying the preferred, active path to that same destination. What best describes the static route's current status?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Losing the top spot doesn't mean a route disappears — it just goes inactive, sitting on the bench in the routing table instead of getting cut from the roster. If the OSPF path ever goes away, Junos can promote that static route back to active without anyone retyping it.
Full Explanation
A route that isn't currently selected as best for its destination doesn't vanish from Junos; it remains in the routing table as an inactive route, simply excluded from the forwarding table while a more-preferred route (here, the OSPF route) is active. Nothing about this process touches the configuration — the static route statement stays exactly as configured, since active/inactive status is a routing-table state, not a configuration change, so claiming it gets deleted is wrong. Junos also does not automatically load-balance across routes of different preference values by default; only routes that are equally preferred and explicitly permitted to share can end up in a load-balanced forwarding next-hop, and that isn't what's described here. And a static route doesn't spontaneously 'become' a floating static route — floating behavior comes from how the route was deliberately configured (typically with a qualified next-hop carrying a higher preference), not from a runtime state change. The practical value of this inactive-but-present static route is resiliency: if OSPF's adjacency to the backup POP drops, Junos can immediately reactivate the static route without any manual intervention. A quick check is show route protocol static <prefix>, which will show the static entry along with its inactive reason.