[AG-TECH] quick question

[Marty Hoag]

> I have a vision of being able to configure my laptop as a "mobile AG
> node" for the purposes of multicast testing and debugging. (I'm
> investigating a Cisco bug which causes multicast packet loss under
> certain conditions, and the beacon grid doesn't offer quite what I
> need).

   What we've done it just download vic and rat on a laptop and
then fire those up manually to check out a room.  The group and port
addresses for all the anl defined venues are available at
   http://venues.accessgrid.org/AG/venues.php

   Vic is nice to use for intermittent outages because you can 
graphs the various stats (I'm at home without a vic but I think
you click on Info, RTP Stats, then the label you want - usually
I use either frames or missing depending on the problem).  You
can stretch the graph out several minutes (each vertical bar is
at 30 second intervals).  The graphs make it very easy to see
common periodic problems and even time them.  I suspect by now
if you give someone like Bill Nickless the pattern he could tell
you what the problem is.  ;-)

   I haven't looked lately but there are precompiled versions
of vic and rat available for windows if the laptop has that.

   Marty