[AG-TECH] Re: setting up local bridging service (fwd)

[Robert Olson]

fyi.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:40:22 -0500
From: Robert Olson <olson at mcs.anl.gov>
To: Joshua Stillerman <jas at psfc.mit.edu>
Cc: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: [AG-TECH] Re: setting up local bridging service

Hi Josh -

I'm sorry about the late reply on this - I tried to find it in my ag-tech 
mail but didn't see it there, wonder if it bounced somewhere. Anyway:

 > We are trying to set up a local bridging service adjacent to our wide
 > area router so that AG traffic will be unicast on our lan.  I would
 > like to get some information and advice about how to proceed.  In no
 > particular order here are the questions issues we are grappling with:
 >      1. Will this work ?  The plan is to set up a box which will
 >         bridge all of the AG traffic for our site.  We will configure
 >         our switches to allow multicast between the router and this
 >         box but not between the router and the rest of our lan.

Yes, that sounds like a good solution.

 >      2. If  we do this will the bridge have to participate in all
 >         venues that we might want to participate or will it only have
 >         to participate in the venues we happen to be visiting at any
 >         given moment.

What do you mean by participate in? If you mean "join the multicast group", 
I believe the way it works is that the bridge will only join the group when 
a unicast user enters the venue.

 >      3. Should we be running our own venue server on this bridge node
 >         ?  Will this help or hinder us in our unicast goals ?

No, I don't see any need to do that (I'm assuming you are running a venue 
server elsewhere on your network).

 >      4. How good a computer to we need for this purpose ?

It depends in some extent on the number of bridge users you are supporting; 
however, I'm sure a reasonably recent 1Ghz + Pentium box will serve well 
(the ANL MSB bridge ran for a long time on PIII/600 box, and before that on 
an even smaller machine). You'll want 100Mbit etheret, or 1G if possible 
(mostly for headroom; I don't anticipate you'll see nearly that much 
traffic, unless the HD folks start doing AG multicasting :-).

 >      5. Should it run windows or linux ?

Linux; I don't believe we support Windows for bridge servers yet.

--bob