Re: MBone

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 01:48:45PM +1200, Franck Martin wrote:
> I'm looking at MBone applications and where the hell is the MBone?
> 
> I'm trying to test it on a linux 2.4 machine, but it seems that mrouted
> does not exists on rpmfind.net or anywhere www.google.com does not link
> to something very relevant..

You might send your linux questions to a linux list rather than an
IETF list.

> Most documents on the Internet are very old.

The mboned page at

  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mboned-charter.html

seems reasonably recent.

My personal experience is that the mbone is alive and well so long
as you are lucky enough to connect to an ISP which provides access
to it. If you don't connect to such an ISP, the mbone effectively
does not exist.

My quite-possibly-ill-informed impression is that multicast deployment
across the internet as a whole has prematurely switched from a
"pre-production" architecture of tunnels across unicast infrastructure,
to a "production" architecture in which tunnels are deprecated and
native multicast is the order of the day.

I would love to find out that my impression, above, is wrong, and
that I am missing some basic method for getting multicast access
from my cable modem in semi-rural Ontario. Each time I have an urge
to receive particular multicast content I waste about a day begging
for tunnels from people who won't give them to me. It would be nice
to put an end to that particular cycle of hatred.


Joe