critique a spidey network

[UNIX72]

Hey spidey07 what techniques do you use to control multicast packets?

 

[Shadow07]

Microsoft giving up on their best OS yet to date? I don't thing so. Who did you hear that from? With the newer version of Windows server, I would totally wait for that version. With crucial updates to Active Directory to make it even better, is a total must. But to say that you don't want to go with Windows 2000 because you like things that don't crash, you really haven't played with Windows 2000. I am yet to have a Windows 2000 machine (Pro, Server, AS, Datacenter) crash on me. THe only problem(s) that I have had was beta drivers for the hardware. Other than that, my machines runs smoothly and cleanly WITHOUT any problems.

Hey, this is about calling out Spidey as a dumba$$, not talking about OS's. But wait, you have to talk about both. 🙂

 

[spidey07]

shadow 🙂 I love giving you crap. we'll argue off line, 'K? But go install some more service pack twos on win2K (especially with IIS) and then get back to me. have fun.

Unix72,
I'm not sure what you mean by control multicast but I'll give a quick explanation of what I do.
switches run either IGMP snooping or CGMP. Both allow a switch to realize what ports belong to particular mcast groups - that way the switch only forwards to joined memebers instead of flooding, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. routers run IGMP or CGMP as well. router needs IGMP to pickup join/leave messages which in turn notifies PIM sparse-dense mode as to group memberships on a particular interface so it can join or prune the PIM source tree. That pretty much covers L2 and L3 in our environment.

NOW the tricky part - how do you control multicast? well, I've developed a multicast address scheme that says 239.1.x.x is low speed (56k) up to 239.4.x.x which is super high quality (1500k). By having four separate address ranges for multicast you can identify based on address what kind of stream it is. On routers with slow links (less than T1) you can use the "ip igmp access-group" command to prevent hosts from joining the high speed groups. basically what I say is "alright mister low speed attached to the source LAN, you can only JOIN this low speed group 239.1.x.x". You can send all the joins you want to a high speed group but I'll never put it into the PIM tree because I will drop process your IGMP.

Also, use "ip multicast rate-limit" to set a stopper on how much mcast can flow across a particular link. That in of itself is a big helper incase you misconfigured something or some dodoo application boy decides multicast is a good way to find all PCs (yep, happens)

can also tweak a little bit with TTLs to limit the range of mcast from the source but I find this to be way too cumbersome.

hope this helps! If you want I can send you my white paper on the subject.

spidey

 

[UNIX72]

Thanks spidey for the infor and could you please send the white paper to my email galvanmcse12@hotmail.com, thanks