All things related to multicast

[Bob Gerdes <>]

We posted to a series of mail lists that are meant to reach out to 
departments the week before. We had about 100 folks test it then with 4 
noting that they had problems for which there were follow up with their 
IT staff asking what needed to be done to adjust their firewalls.

In addition, we posted a reminder to the mail lists on Monday so it would 
be there when they read their email Tuesday morning.

On inauguration day, we started with pointing folks at the Internet2 feed.
Things worked fine until about 9:30am when we had at least 120 folks 
testing/watching. However, we were forced to point them at a local 
multicast feed as our Internet2 feed was extremely poor (this was odd 
since our I2 handoff had not reached our max). By the time we switched,
about 300 had tried to use it. After we switched, we had over 600 watching 
the multicast and aside from isolated reports (firewall problems and the 
like), it worked well.

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Mike Carey wrote:

> Just curious - did you engage in any public information to encourage
> people to use the Multicast option that was available?
>
> I ask because I think we had the same issue here.  Multicast traffic
> increased above the norm, but it was unicast traffic that was really
> took off that day.  But besides the IT folks, I don't know that anyone
> knew that Multicast over I2 was the preferred method to access this
> media.  We didn't send any media blitz to the campus newspaper, Blog
> postings, or updates on Departmental websites (that I know of).
>
> So if anyone took proactive steps to encourage the user community to use
> Multicast in this situation, please share.
>
>
> Michael D. Carey
> Telecommunications and Networking Services
> Information Technology Services
> Pennsylvania State University
> (814) 863-7712
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ryan Harden 
> [mailto:]
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 6:48 PM
> To: 
>
> Cc: Julian Y. Koh; wg-multicast List
> Subject: Re: Inauguration Day Stream(s)
>
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> We saw an increase of about 1Gbps or so over normal levels for that time
> of day. Almost all of it was CNN's feed. A couple other sources showed
> up in there too. We didn't have any 'pain' in any of our equipment. We
> did get some fun looking graphs though. :)
>
> Unfortunately even though we have good multicast connectivity to
> Internet2, no one used it. Our traffic characterization tools didn't
> show anything over baseline.
>
> /Ryan
>
> Bill Owens wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 04:09:53PM -0600, Julian Y. Koh wrote:
> > > Now, we had definite pains on some of our external traffic due to the
> > > Octoshape P2P streaming that CNN was employing, but luckily we
> already had
> > > our multicast traffic bypassing the equipment that was hurting.
> Otherwise
> > > life would have been not so good for us.  As it was, the pain that
> people
> > > were experiencing with the unicast streams (and I'm including the
> Octoshape
> > > streams there as well) is going to serve as a good leverage for
> publicizing
> > > the multicast-based services.
> >
> > It would have been bitterly ironic if the all-but-unannounced P2P
> pseudo-multicast traffic had interfered with the one high-grade
> multicast feed that was available to us.
> > We saw unicast traffic peaks at almost 1.2 Gbps on our egress
> connections, with several campuses maxing out their connections, all
> attributable to Octoshape (since NYSERNet doesn't provide transit to any
> commercial streaming sources). I'm glad that the network was used, but I
> do wish that they could come up with something a bit smarter.
> > Bill.
>
> - --
> Ryan M. Harden, BS, KC9IHX              Office: 217-265-5192
> CITES - Network Engineering             Cell:   630-363-0365
> 2130 Digital Computer Lab,              Fax:    217-244-7089
> 1304 W. Springfield                     email:  
>
> Urbana, IL  61801
>
>          University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign
>                     -  All your Base -
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