Round 2

[Ivan R. Judson]

Howdy all,

I promised a plan, but here is a bit more than that.  I'm going to describe
the problems and put forth a solution. 

The problem we have is the following:

- AG 1.0 used statically assigned multicast addresses for the media (e.g.
one address for video and one address for audio).

- There has been some work at making sure this set of addresses work,
including various firewall, bridge, and tunneling solutions.

- AG 2.0 uses dynamically assigned addresses for media by default, however
static addressing is supported. The static address support should ensure
events like SCGlobal can succeed.

- We can't support infinite backwards compatibility , but want to backward
compatibility enough for users to comfortably transition (we don't want to
abandon the community!)

- We're moving to dynamic addressing, but before we can do entirely dynamic
address allocation we need to ensure the basic services are fault tolerant
and robust enough to handle the problems associated with network brokenness.

- During the transition we need the right solution so the community can
transition comfortably from AG1.0 to AG2.0.

So, what do we do?  Other folks with ideas should feel free to contribute
them, but I recognize it might be hard to contribute an idea after only a
week of alpha --

1) AG2 will incorporate functionality to statically configure a Virtual
Venue with audio and video media streams. These statically configured
streams are AG1 compliant streams (ie, H.261 video or 16bit, 16KHz
uncompressed audio). This will be available as soon as we (or someone else)
has time to implement it.

2) We will host a transitional AG2 Venue Server that is initialized with the
AG1 venues (same name, description, and media streams) so that AG2 users can
collaborate with AG1 users. The Virtual Venues we would support in
transition are at the end of this email.

3) We will transition over time, along the following event timeline:
	- On or near September 15th we'll turn off the existing Virtual
Venue Server
	- On or near November 31st, we'll stop supporting the transitional
server.

If there are any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to send email
to ag-tech.

--Ivan


Transitional Virtual Venues
----------------------------

< Insert List Here >