All things related to multicast

[(Kevin C. Almeroth)]

I wanted to do a longer, detailed description of events at the vBNS/NLANR
Joint Techs meeting in Las Cruces this past week, but I'm running out
of energy, so I'll do my best to just summarize what happened.

There were two meetings related to multicast.  The first was Sunday
afternoon where we talked about peering relationships and the status
of multicast in various networks.

Hugh LaMaster talked about NREN...  which is now running PIM-SM and
is MSDP peering with the Ames MIX and vBNS in Chicago.  Randy Nicklas
gave a presentation about vBNS.  They have also recently upgraded
to PIM-SM and are MSDP peering with NREN and Merit, MBGP peering
with 8 sites, and providing MBGP translation with 20 other sites.
Steven Wallace talked about Abilene.  The story there is that they
had a version of Cisco IOS deployed (12.0.2.7S) that had a
point-to-multipoint bug in it so this weekend they are going to
try upgrading the IOS to see if the problem fixes.  There is significant
interest in moving rapidly to deploy multicast.  When multicast is
deployed several additional networks including CA*Net 2/3,
SURFnet, NREN, etc. are interested in MSDP peering.  The message is
that even though we are running in to some problems, we are on the
right track and should have native multicast deployed relatively
soon.

I also gave a talk on Tuesday about the status of multicast and
some problems/solutions to multi-homing multicast.  You can see
the slides (if you are PPT capable) at:

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/publish/VBNS-NLANR:NM-99.ppt

The next likely time for a meeting will be April 28th in DC at
the I2 member meeting.  I'll try to forward updates as they
occur.

Finally, if people on the list have topics they are interested in
discussing, please raise them.  Traffic on the list has been light 
(which is not necessarily a bad thing), but worthy issues should
definitely be raised.

-Kevin Almeroth