All things related to multicast

[Havard Eidnes <>]

>   But I hope that Bill's issue (on the need to improve on our current habit 
> of imposing on L2 switch vendors to snoop intelligently) will receive 
> serious attention.

Indeed.  Having the L2 switch implementors need to track and implement
the required intelligence to support the various variations we come up
with at L3 over the lifetime of the L2 devices has always struck me as
architecturally awkward and unlikely to produce the most economical L2
devices (needing to support field software/firmware upgrades).

I wonder if it wouldn't be an architecturally better idea (and
something which is likely to produce a better longer-term stable
solution) to standardize a protocol which the L3 devices (routers)
could use to speak to the L2 devices to control the distribution of
multicast traffic whithin the L2 network.  That way, if one decide to
tweak the L3 protocol, the L3-to-L2 protocol would not necessarily
need to change.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that this is part of what the
Cisco-specific CGMP protocl does?

(I know, probably treading on thin ice here...)

Regards,

- Håvard