Sometimes you'll see a weird route status (RIB-failure) in your BGP table, for example:

GW#show ip bgp ¦ include r>
r> 10.2.0.0/16      10.0.1.2                 0             0 65001 i

A more thorough investigation of the BGP entry does not give you a lot of additional information:

GW#show ip bgp 10.2.0.0
BGP routing table entry for 10.2.0.0/16, version 7
Paths: (1 available, best #1, table Default-IP-Routing-Table, RIB-failure(17))
Flag: 0x820
  Advertised to update-groups:
        1    2
  65001
    10.0.1.2 from 10.0.1.2 (10.0.1.2)
      Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, external, best

The “mistery” is solved when you inspect the entry in the IP routing table:

GW#show ip route 10.2.0.0
Routing entry for 10.2.0.0/16
  Known via "static", distance 1, metric 0 (connected)
  Routing Descriptor Blocks:
  * directly connected, via Null0
      Route metric is 0, traffic share count is 1

The GW router has a static route that collides with the EBGP route and thus the BGP route cannot be inserted in the IP routing table (as the static route has administrative distance 1).

Let's conclude with a few interesting facts about the RIB failures:

• The RIB failure feature was introduced in IOS release 12.2T; prior to that, the BGP routes with higher administrative distance than other route sources were silently ignored (similar to all other routing protocols).
• You can display BGP routes that are not inserted in the IP routing table with the show ip bgp rib-failure command, which also explains why the BGP route was not inserted in the IP routing table.
• The BGP routes that are not used due to higher administrative distance are still advertised to all BGP peers (contrary to what most other distance-vector routing protocols do), unless you configure bgp suppress-inactive (introducted in 12.2T and 12.0(26)S).