Someone asked me to explain static routing. I'm not network expert and I have limited experience with this but here goes...
In a nutshell, static routing is when you have to manually configure each of your routers so that they know where to send packets to. Why would you need to do that when dynamic routing usually works so well?
In the case of a home user, the typical case is when you have multiple routers on the same network. In my case, this is because I have a Linksys Router with Wireless-g and VOIP support. I like using it almost like a wireless access point. But the problem is that other machines on the network can't find any of the the other machines that are connected to that router.
There are several ways to configure things but in my case I've just plugged the Linksys VOIP Router into one of LAN ports on the D-Link 604. So the Linksys has an IP address that is assigned to it by the D-Link (e.g. 192.168.0.x). The Linksys has a DHCP server and it's client are given addresses in the 192.168.15.y range. The Linksys clients can access the internet and communicate with other machines but the D-Link clients cannot access the the Linksys clients.
By the way, this was the configuration that Vonage recommended and it works perfectly for VOIP. So from what I understand, if I can define static routes in the first router then packets should be able to find their way from clients of the D-Link router to clients of the Linksys router.
