All things related to multicast

[Mark Boolootian <>]

> I'm not about to suggest that we drop support for wide-area IPv4 multicast. 
> There are
> legitimate uses still being made of it, even though there aren't any in 
> evidence on our
> network this Monday morning. I'm really beginning to wonder whether IPv6 
> multicast has
> a future, though. It seems to me that we're now seeing the other side of 
> the adoption
> curve for wide-area multicast in general, and as a result we aren't going 
> to have even
> the low volume of interesting applications for IPv6 multicast that drove 
> the original adoption
> for IPv4.

Funny to see this.  I started cobbling together an email last week
asking about (IPv4) multicast sources:

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I'm hunting for some VLC-digestible multicast sources.  Once upon a time:

  http://www.internet2.edu/multicast/sources.html

actually pointed to working sources.  I suspect the only way of fixing
that page is to remove it.

I don't find a great deal of inter-domain mcast when googling.
Northwestern stands out:

  http://www.i2-multicast.northwestern.edu/

but I sure don't see much else.  Perhaps copyright issues stand in the
way of folks sourcing content.  But more likely is that no one cares
about multicast.

--------------

For several years, the only production requirement we had for
multicast here was a faculty member who made use of Conference XP for
collaborating with folks at several other sites.  This faculty member
served as our mcast routing monitoring system.  When it broke, he'd
let us know.  But I've broken multicast a couple of times over the
past year and haven't heard any complaints, so I'm guessing he's no
longer making use of it.

We aren't yet routing IPv6 multicast, but likely will be within the
next four to six months.  Though I'm not sure why.