I am not in a position to test this and I was curious if anyone knew the answer.
Lets say I have a network 10.0.0.0/24 and I have two routers that go out to the internet, 10.0.0.253 and 10.0.0.254.
Lets say that the default route for each workstation is 10.0.0.254 and each workstation only has a single interface and is running a version of windows, lets say XP.
Now here are the questions:
Lets say I create the route 0.0.0.0 10.0.0.253 with a higher metric than the route to .254. Would the workstations then use this other router to access the internet if there are issues with the first router? Are there any problems or concerns that can occur by doing this?
Next if the above was to work, could I flip on RIP on the routers and install some type of RIP listener on the windows machines and let them find the routers on their own? Would they not assign a cost to each route and pick the better one with this method?
Am I way off track here, is there a better way to go about this? Any advice on the matter is welcome.
You are going to want to look at doing this at the network layer with HSRP/VRRP instead of trying to mess around with local routing tables.
HSRP is a Cisco proprietary standard, while VRRP is not.
Since you don't say what kind of routers you have I can't give you much more detail than the above wikipedia links. If you let us know the manufactuer and model of the routers then we can give you more detail.
first question: no, your workstation would not use the second route because it would have no way to know of any status changes on the 10.0.0.254 device.
most versions of Windows do have a RIP listener service, you could enable that and then set both router to use RIP and if the 10.0.0.254 device went off line then, after a bit of time, the 10.0.0.253 would be the only route the PC would have and it should use that