All things related to multicast

[Stig Venaas <>]

William F. Maton Sotomayor wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, 
>
>  wrote:
>
> > All,
> >        We have been looking at all sorts of tools to help us monitor
> > Multicasting traffic on our network.  I was wondering what is everyone
> > else using??
> >
> > Almost every thing on the web is a bit stale...

One common tool is of course the multicast beacons. There are several 
ones to choose from. The most commonly used is perhaps the NLANR one, 
see http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Beacon/

A new beacon implementation which is promising, is also dbeacon, see 
http://dbeacon.innerghost.net/

Stig

> You are right, most things 'out there' are stale, and seem to be dated 
> from the heyday when multicast was a brand new shiney protocol running 
> via tunnels and over Suns....
>
> We internally are using Cisco NAM's for our tiny fleet of 6500's to 
> obtain a glance at traffic across the core, and Dave Plonka's flowscan 
> tools to get a generalized view of multicast traffic totals.
>
> I also have some home-brewed/adapted tools, such as an SDR viewer and 
> MBGP route table monitor and doo-dads of a sort. [*]  They're a bit 
> dated as I need to include mcast IPv6 and such....
>
> Of course, it all boils down to exactly what you are looking for which 
> would lead you to the right tool for the job.
>
> wfms
>
> [*]
>
> http://ryouko.imsb.nrc.ca/bgp-mcast/bgp-all.html
> http://ryouko.imsb.nrc.ca/x-bin/mroutes.pl