With respect, the problems weren't all with the multicast. Many of the problems had to do with SNAFU. Merit had a fire at one of our computing centers two days prior to NANOG. Service restoration for Merit had taken precedence and we had insufficient time to properly test our broadcast environments under Real and MBONE. Add to this coordination problems for MBONE in general and it was amazing that we got it working at all. The only thing I can say is that next time, we'll do better. (Unless the fire demons conspire against us again.) FWIW, we also had distribution issues with Real due to licensing and available bandwidth. In order for this to scale better the next time, we'll have to make arrangements for multiple servers around the Internet to handle the load appropriately. Theoretically (and only speaking as such - I'm inexperienced with MBONE and multicast in general), Multicast should scale better. I'll leave that discussion to those who _do_ have the experience. (And hopefully I'll be able to help contribute to the data set at the next NANOG with a properly working setup.) So, please don't use NANOG as an example of the failure of multicast. Such evaluations should be done with all other things being equal. I'd like to thank Nortel, Mlink and CW for all their help in getting things done as well as they were under the circumstances. On Tue, Oct 05, 1999 at 05:31:00PM +0400, Alex P. Rudnev wrote:
And - your NANOG forum is the excellent example. RealVideo streaming work fine; Multicast don't work at all;
Aleksei Roudnev, Network Operations Center, Relcom, Moscow
-- Jeffrey Haas - Merit RSng project - jeffhaas@merit.edu