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I have built a version of vic that will act as a multicast beacon for
debugging the network. It is a standard vic, with the X11 grabber, that
has been modified to send its status reports to a unicast destination
(putnam.mcs.anl.gov/19021) as well as to its multicast group. This, along
with a unicast->local multicast bridge on putnam, will allow us to get
a clear view of multicast connectivity. That is, if we senders in the
unicast bridged monitor view that we don't see on the actual multicast
monitor, we know there is some missing connectivity. <br>
<br>
At some point we'll need to put together some robust analysis tools (java
media framework would be a great base to start from on these) that can
give us some more direct answers about broken connectivity, but this
beacon along with rtpmon will be a good start.<br>
<br>
<b>AG Sites: Please start the beacon and leave it running as much as
possible.</b> It uses the X11 grabber to send a low-bandwidth video
signal to the multicast group 224.1.2.4/20040 with a ttl of 127. Leaving
this running at all times will greatly aid the network folks in debugging
any multicast connectivity problems.<br>
<br>
The RPM is at<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~olson/AG/Software/Linux/RPMS/ag-beacon-1.0-1.i386.rpm" eudora="autourl">http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~olson/AG/Software/Linux/RPMS/ag-beacon-1.0-1.i386.rpm</a><br>
<br>
It installs the beacon into /usr/local/ag/apps/beacon with a symlink of
the executable into /usr/local/ag/bin/beacon.<br>
<br>
--bob</html>