PROPOSAL: turning off Argonne bridges

[Bill Nickless]

I propose Argonne turn off the unicast/multicast bridges that have been 
supporting the Access Grid effort, effective on Wednesday, 1 March 2000.

Reasons for doing this include:

  - Moving forward on the Virtual Venue deployment.  VV is incompatible
    with the use of unicast/multicast bridges.

  - Generally encouraging the use of native IP multicast.

In lieu of supporting the unicast/multicast bridges, I would be pleased to 
help deploy native IP multicast at the various Access Grid sites.  This can 
be done through the "Roll Your Own" multicast method as has been done at 
the University of New Mexico.  Each Access Grid site would need to purchase 
a Cisco 2621 router if the local site IP multicast is not working 
well.  The date of 1 March 2000 has been chosen to allow the Cisco 2621 
router to be ordered and delivered before the cutoff date.

See http://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/nickless/RollOwnMulticast.ppt for more 
information and background on this option.

In parallel with a "Roll Your Own" IP multicast implementation, I would be 
happy to work with your local networking people to deploy IP multicast 
routing natively.  Through the Access Grid and Chautauqua experience, the 
network folks have learned a lot about native multicast deployment, and we 
would be happy to share what we've learned with your people.

Obviously comments are welcome and encouraged.
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Bill Nickless    http://www.mcs.anl.gov/people/nickless      +1 630 252 7390
PGP:0E 0F 16 80 C5 B1 69 52 E1 44 1A A5 0E 1B 74 F7     nickless at mcs.anl.gov