All things related to multicast

[Guy Almes <>]

Bill / Craig / others,
  This would also be a good topic for the Multicast Sessions at the
coming Pittsburgh Campus Engineering workshop.
  Regards,
        -- Guy

"Craig M. Votava" wrote:
> 
> 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