All things related to multicast

[Guy T Almes <>]

Håvard,
 Thanks for the note.
 I think that (in addition to the critique of the current approach) Bill 
Nickless has a few specific suggestions addressing how we would accomplish 
this without requiring L2 devices to do L2 snooping.

Bill,
 Am I right that you have specific ideas here?

Bill and others,
 Is there work addressing this issue that is current within the IETF?

 Regards,
       -- Guy

--On Saturday, August 10, 2002 00:15:38 +0200 Havard Eidnes <> 
wrote:

> >   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