The Near and Far End of a Link

Cisco IOS Software differentiates in terms of administrative-distance static routes pointing to a directly connected interface and routes pointing toward the far end of an attached link. The administrative distance is 0 for the former and 1 for the latter. Although UNIX gateways do have the notion of static routes pointing to directly connected interfaces, they do not share this view of far ends in general, but rather from a hop-count point of view.