All things related to multicast

[Stig Venaas <>]

Greg Wickham wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> The dbeacon source seems no longer available at 
> http://fivebits.net/~hugo/dbeacon/
>
> I was just about to get it installed across AARNet but this hinders that 
> progress.
>
> First question, can it be downloaded from elsewhere?

Hi Greg,

Perhaps with subversion,
svn co http://mars.innerghost.net/svn/dbeacon/trunk dbeacon

I'm not able to get it from there either though... I'e asked the author
what's up.

> Second, how does dbeacon compare to the NLANR beacon for IPv4 use? 
> Packaging the NLANR beacon is proving difficult - the simpler dbeacon 
> seems quite appealing.

The one thing I don't like with dbeacon, is that it uses multicast for 
reporting the results. There are advantages (like anyone can have their 
own "server"), but it also means that it's harder to notice when 
multicast doesn't work for a client (you'll have to realise that it's
missing from the matrix).

Another nice thing with dbeacon is that it does SSM, but unless you
explicitly tell each client who the others are, it uses ASM to discover
other clients, so hard to use if only SSM works.

Stig

> tia,
>
>   -Greg