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Re: [Proposal: do multicast testing on TTM boxes]

  • From: Jerome Durand <
    >
  • Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:39:42 +0200

Well I think RIPE TTM should support IP multicast (both IPv4 and IPv6
multicast). This would provide very interesting monitoring accross the
different domains. Of course intradomain multicast monitoring would be
done using NOC's tools already deployed.

Thanks

Jerome

Hi Folks,

I've briefly discussed this with Henk, and I'd like to discuss it in
the mailing list, to see whether there is support for it.

The initial question was "how to monitor the multicast Internet?", and
the answer is *hard* - you can't easily do it from just within one
network, as you never have a proper full view of multicast packets
flowing "to" and "fro".

So what you want is

 - multicast beacons, that send packets in regular intervals to
   well-known multicast addresses (some beacons exist already)

 - multicast listeners, that monitor incoming beacon packets, and
   complain if packets from given senders stop arriving

 - some high level monitoring infrastructure that can use the data from
   "lots of beacons and listeners" to figure out *where* the problem is
   (it *has* to be in *this* or *that* AS, or in between)

And while thinking about how to build something like this internal to
our network, I thought "this is something the RIPE TTM network could
do perfectly well" - lots of boxes already deployed, good contacts to
local universities to write evaluation software, etc.

What do you think?

Gert Doering
        -- hosting TT12, which was broken for 2 years or so, but will
           be back to life "real soon now"