All things related to multicast

[Bill Owens <>]

On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 12:53:55PM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> Shouldn't the backbone networks be defining RPs only for groups that 
> IANA has assigned, and not the RESERVED and UNASSIGNED blocks?

By 'backbone', I assume you mean 'campus backbone', right? Whether Abilene 
has an RP or not (and I don't know off the top of my head whether they do) 
won't make any difference. 

That's a good point; it certainly ought to be possible to clamp down on some 
of this by restricting the groups at the RP. That may have some downsides 
though:

 - some campuses may want the broken applications to work on campus, even if 
they would rather not have the traffic leaking to the outside world (and most 
have only one RP, or RP set)

 - some broken apps choose reserved groups, but are meant to work on the wide 
area.

 - it's yet another piece of state in the config that needs to be watched, 
and AFAIK there's no announcement list for new IANA multicast assignments (at 
least, I'm not on it ;)

Unfortunately there's a lot of weird stuff floating around in MSDP. I don't 
have the foggiest idea what most of it is, and no time to look; I only 
investigated this one because it came up in some other troubleshooting. I'm 
sure there are additional treasures to be found there. . .

Bill.