IP Multicast for ladon.cisse.ualr.edu (144.167.8.209)

[Bill Nickless]

Nickolas,

Thank you for running the beacon.  That is the best first step towards 
getting your IP multicast up and running.  You should leave it up and 
running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the foreseeable future.

It appears that your campus has not enabled IP multicast peering with the 
Great Plains Network and/or Abilene.  My router, and Abilene's routers, 
show that IP unicast is working just fine, but that there's not even a 
multicast advertisement in place for that prefix.

I'm afraid you're going to need to contact your local and campus networking 
people to find out what the story is with IP multicast.

If it turns out that they cannot provide IP multicast in the near term, it 
may become necessary for you to set up a "roll-your-own" IP multicast 
solution.  That will involve purchasing a relatively inexpensive Cisco 2621 
router which can encapsulate the IP multicast packets into IP unicast.  For 
more information on that option, see the PowerPoint presentation available at

   http://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/nickless/RollOwnMulticast.ppt

At least two Access Grid sites are already using this solution as a stopgap 
until a longer term solution can be deployed.

As I have said before, I am quite happy to be of any assistance I can, up 
to and including traveling to your site to assist with deployment.  Please 
feel free to give my contact information to your networking people.  I will 
continue to monitor the ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov mailing list for further 
questions.  There are also other networking people on this mailing list who 
can assist, so send your questions to the ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov mailing list 
rather than me individually.

Good luck--we'll get this working one way or another!
===
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