All things related to multicast

["Craig M. Votava" <>]

Bill-

Bill Owens wrote:
> 
> I think there are three problems preventing better deployment. One is
> that some sites' hardware just can't cut it; they have routers or
> switches that don't do anything but DVMRP, they have too many hubs,
> they have no choice but to use a firewall. Another is that multicast
> is hard to troubleshoot - it works (and breaks) differently from
> unicast, some of the troubleshooting tools are quirky and unreliable,
> there's less monitoring and alerting. The last is that it breaks, for
> me at least, on a constant basis.

Boy, Howdy! I believe you've hit the nail on the head here. I've been
multicasting inside Lucent since 1994, and its exactly these deployment
problems you mention, that prevent multicasting from really taking off.

Is there any chance of having someone teach a down-and-dirty multicasting
rollout/debugging class of-and-on an multi-vendor router network? In fact,
to make it closer to real life, routers from any single vendor should be
running a few different firmware/software releases, and the layout should
include some DVMRP as well as PIM (and maybe others?). Sorry if you've heard
whining like this from me before (Hi Kevin), but this sort of thing could
really help us make our multicast setup much more stable. Once the stability
is there, I feel its usage and demand would really take off.

> All that being said, I do like multicast, especially native
> multicast. Things have come a long, long way since the first time I
> pulled up a multicast tunnel and they continue to get better.

Amen!

-Craig