This is a very dangerous advice. OSPF definitely has a lot more interesting failure modes than static routing. In other words, you advise students to economise on simple things (configuring networks) to get hit with complicated problems (fixing the broken networks) later on. Also, static routes do not generate any flap. A malfunctioning OSPF speaker can bring down the entire network. The real answer - do static routing whereever you have only a single path for packets to go thru. To eliminate mistakes, generate configuration automatically from master maps kept at network engineering computers. --vadim KISS - keep things as simple as possible... OSPF is an open protocol, and it's very simple in case if you have not 500 routers and 1000 flapping routes in the network - what do you searching the headache for? Multicast routing depends more from the options you have from the hardware vendor - choose the simplest and more standard method and turn it on... PS. From my lectures to the students, quote: --- The most complex routing method is STATIC - it's easy to implement (for the HW vendor) but most difficult to configure. The simplest routing is just dynamic routing in the plain schema (for example, 'router ospf 1/network 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 - just 2 lines for the CISCO, compare to the static' - may be it can argue someone do not use the static at all -:)