[AG-TECH] Additional bridging questions

[Randy Groves]

At 02:58 PM 6/6/2003 -0500, Robert Olson wrote:

>>What is the bandwidth of the unicast connection that comes out of the 
>>bridge?  Can one assume that it is close to an aggregate of all of the 
>>multicast streams that one might receive at a fully connected AG node?
>
>Yup. The msb and qb bridges are dumb in that they forward down each 
>unicast link the aggregation of all traffic from the other unicast links 
>and the multicast link (and vice versa, but that will likely be much less 
>traffic).

Sort of what I suspected.


>>Looking at the Quickbridge, it seems a viable option, and I've heard of 
>>it being done, to use two Quickbridges on either side of a firewall (or 
>>router) to 'tunnel' the multicast between two disconnected multicast 
>>domains.  Anybody done this?  Willing to share the details?
>
>If you're doing this anyway, would it be possible to convince the firewall 
>admins to just let multicast UDP pass thru? (I think Bill Nickless has 
>some slides somewhere on the security implications of multicast)

That would be fine - but in my hypothetical situation, I'm thinking that 
the router or firewall may not be the only thing separating the two 
multicast domains.  The packets might have to traverse a non-multicast 
segment as well.  Which brings up some additional questions of the 
viability of using some sort of VPN for security and all the latency and 
bandwidth implications that something like that might imply.

-randy


>--bob