MBone Working Group

Minutes of the RIPE-28 Mbone WG meeting

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Report of Meeting, 25th September 1997

1. Administrive Issues

1.1 Appointment of scribe and provisional chairman
Provisional Chairman: Kurt Kayser 
Scribe: Nigel Titley  

1.2 Agenda bashing
No changes were suggested for the draft agenda as previously circulated.

1.3 Election of new WG chairman
The previous WG chairman has had to resign due to change of employment 
which leaves him with less time to devote to the WG. A new chairman was 
required if the working group was to continue. The provisional chairman,
Kurt Kayser, of VIAG Interkom (de.viag) was willing to stand if no other
volunteers came forward.

There being no other volunteers, Kurt Kayser was unanimously elected 
chairman.

2. Coordination of new WG web server location (and mailing list)
There exists a WG web site, but this has not been maintained or updated 
for over a year. It is believed to be at KTH, but the owner is not 
known. Lars-Johan Liman will attempt to find out who owns and operates 
it at present. [AP1.1 Liman]

Given a need for a web server for the WG, a location needs to be found 
which is accessible to the WG members and chairman. It was agreed to 
approach RIPE to see if they would be willing to host the WG site, 
although some concern was expressed by WG members that the performance 
and connectivity of the RIPE server was less than optimal.

The WG mailing list has probably been maintained from a similar location
to the web site. The chairman agreed to find out from RIPE who controls 
the WG list and obtain control [AP1.2 Kayser].

3. Outstanding Action items
Due to the generally moribund nature of the group over 2 or 3 meetings, 
there were no existing action items.

4. Vendor implementation status
WG attendees seemed general reluctant to discuss what implementation 
they were using. It was agreed that the mailing list should be used to 
gather data with the aim of building a list of current recommended 
implementations (if any exist).

Bernard Tuy brought up the problem of memory leaks in the version of IOS
that he was running (11.2(8?)). Group discussion suggested that there 
were similar leaks in various other implementations, including the 
server based ones. This suggests a rather deeper problem, maybe protocol
related. Further details may come out of the process of building the 
recommended implementations list.

A straw poll of the WG revealed that most people are running *some* 
version of multicast software. No one was running PIM sparse mode, one 
person was running PIM dense mode. All else were running DVMRP.

Bernard Tuy raised the issue of known problems running PIM and DVMRP on 
the same LAN. It was unclear whether this was related to running 
then both on the same router, or just on the same network segment. No 
else had seen this as so few people are running PIM. The reason for this
is that there are still serious limitations on converting DVMRP back to 
PIM at the edge of PIM clouds. Bonito Antonio Blasco Bonito claimed that
there are no problems when PIM alone is used.

A poll of ISPs in the WG revealed that very few were running multicast 
on their production routers with the possible exception of EBone. EBone 
have found a significant number of problems with multicast and consider 
the IOS implementation to be insufficiently stable to run on a "fit and 
forget" basis, although it can provide limited functionality, if only 
DVMRP is run and the routers are watched closely. Until the DVMRP -> PIM
conversion problem is fixed, it will not be possible for any  backbone 
provider to convert to PIM. EBone are investigating whether to remove 
the tunnels on their backbone and run DVMRP together with IP multicast, 
for reasons of bit efficiency and also ease of administration.

[AP1.3 All] Send details of working multicast implementations to the 
mailing list for the Chairman to collate into a recommended list [AP1.4 
Kayser]. 

5. New tools/vendors for Audio/Video emerging
New tools and vendors for real time audio and video are starting to 
emerge. There is a need to compile a list of these. It was agreed to use
the mailing list to compile a list of these. All WG members to send any 
information they have to the list [AP1.5 All] for the chairman to 
compile [AP1.6 Kayser].

The chairman noted that RTP2 is now both an IETF and ITU standard 
(RFC1889 and ITU-T H.225).

Some ISPs are starting to run telephony over Internet, which gives rise 
to the possibility of conference calls using multicast. A certain amount
of audience scepticism made itself apparent at this point.

Netscape and Microsoft were noted to be introducing real time audio and 
video into their products and were looking at the possibility of using 
multicast as the transport mechanism.

6. Multicast on Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)
No one present had information on any IXP that currently allows 
multicast on their switch. It was noted (Christian Panigl) that the 
problem is that switches normally treat multicast as broadcast and just 
replicate packets and transmit to all segments. This is a heavy load on 
the switch processor and also results in multicast traffic appearing on 
segments even when it is not wanted.

It was noted that the switch vendors need to do more work on this.

There was general agreement that IXPs were the logical place to deploy 
multicast, but that the above problems made it difficult to just switch 
it one. Suggestions were made for a separate switch or segment solely 
for carrying multicast traffic. This was agreed to be a good idea.

7. AOB
Antonio Blasco Bonito asked if anyone knew about developments in BGP to 
allow multicast routing information to be carried. The chairman replied 
that he knew that such work was being carried out by the IETF but was 
not aware of how far it had progressed.

Agenda
------

                  Draft Agenda for Mbone-WG
                        RIPE 28

A. Administrative issues
15min
        - volunteering of the scribe
        - WG-agenda bashing
        - election of new WG-chairman
                introduction: KK37-RIPE

B. Coordination of new WG-server location
10min
        - currently @KTH
        - location of new WG-server (RIPE?)
        - mailing-list stays at sics.se?!

C. Outstanding action items
?min
        - are there any?

D. Vendor implementation status (new)
15min
        - CISCO - which is 'THE' recommended IOS
        - mrouted - last stable version
        - other LAN device vendors 
                (OS, Hubs, Switches)

F. New tools/vendors for Audio/Video emerging
15min
        - comparison by functionality
        - comparison by conformance (RFC, ITU-T)

E. Multicast on IXPs.
15min
        - how to do it?
        - suggestions and open discussion

Z. AOB