Multicast

Wed May 7 03:12:13 UTC 1997

In message <Pine.LNX.3.95.970506102317.19519G-100000 at wacky.eit.com>, "Matt Rann
ey" writes:
>On Tue, 6 May 1997, Aleph One wrote:
>
>>    Morning all. I was wonderign if anyone could comment on how deployed is
>> multicast routing in real-world networks. How many of you have enabled
>> multicast routing in your core routers? Do you offer this as a service to
>
>All the sites that I'm familiar with are still using tunnels.  Some of
>those tunnels might be homed on dedicated routers instead of a
>Unix/mrouted machine, but I'd be somewhat suprised if anybody ran
>native multicast in their core routers.
>
>People pay for unicast traffic, and its not worth messing up that
>unicast traffic for a fun multicast experiment that'll crash your
>router or run it out of memory ever other day.

The primary reasons people use dedicate mrouters is for reliablity and
the fact that that's they way they used to have to do it.  (Cisco's didn't
always have multicast routers).  Its run on lots of real world networks
tho, Cisco, Sun, old NSFNet, several of the large nationals will
feed you multicast.

The main issues with multicast according to nanog, are configuration
and policy issues.  Current mrouting protocols don't allow for policy
based filtering, but there are people working on it.

---
Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc.      jerry at fc.net
PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708  |  1-800-968-8750  |  512-458-9810
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