CURRENT MEETING REPORT


Minutes of the MBONE Engineering and Operations BOF (MBONENG)

Reported by Dino Farinacci, Cisco Systems


Steve Deering gave opening presentation
 
o  Goals of BOF
   Identify problems
   Learn about status updates
   Implementations
o  Agenda
   ISP presentations
   Management tools
   Implementations

The following peopleÕs presentation slides are attached to these 
minutes: Jeff Young (MCI), Ken Carlberg (SIAC), Tim Maufer and Cyndi 
Jung (3Com), Dino Farinacci (Cisco), Carl Malamud (Internet 
Multicasting Service),  Henry Clark (BBN Planet), Dave Thaler 
(Merit).

In addition, the following presentations were made:

DirecPC, GM Hughes
o  65,000 Satellite Broadcast which does IP multicast
o  Multicast FTP service
o  Multimedia service
o  Turbo Internet service
o  Winsock and Multicast Extensions API
o  Multicast addresses administratively managed.
o  DES encryption
o  Apps
   Financial ticker
   Sports ticker
   Usenet News
   Indeo MPEG 
   Package Delivery
o  We need help
   Routing
Adminstrative
Applications


University of Oregon, David Meyer
o  Protect Core Business (unicast forwarding)
o  RPF over multipaths    
o  Multicast and unicast topologies a problem
o  Currently Doing
   Uses GRE tunnels running PIM with DVMRP unicast routing


UUNet, Hank Kilmer
o  Don't make money on multicast
   Generally means people upgrade their bandwidth :-)
o  Did PIM testing over the summer
o  Wants to replace mrouted with ciscos
   Configuration and management tools based on cisco config files


Sprint, Sean Doran
o  MBONE is a toy
o  Busy making unicast work- short on resources to support
o  Interested in getting it to work
o  Future
   Grow multicast topology along lines of physical topology
   Working on monitoring tools to minimize Van-o-grams.


ICM, Peter Lothberg
o  Showed topology map slide
   One sparcstations MR schnell.ebone.net
o  Wants to combine multicast and unicast topology


VBMS
o  OC-3 infrastructure
o  Interest to doing testing over the MBONE


The Multicast Diagnostic Architecture, Van Jacobson
o  Intent: make multicast problems easier/faster to deduce
o  3 different diagnostics
   RTP reception reports identify who is having problems.
   Mtrace identifies which node is having problems
   SNMP identifies (via multicast MIB) who or what is causing the 
   problem
o  RTP Reception Reports
   Requires low-rate reception report transmission
   Reports are multicast, determine error-rate member is seeing from 
   sender rtpmon-T 5 224.2.0.11/21010
o  Mtrace
   Designed to be more efficient than traceroute
   Gives more diagnostic info then traceroute (packet counts from each 
   hop identify where traffic is being lost).
   Designed to work wherever multicast forwarding works I.e., works 
   through firewalls and to/through hosts with partial routing 
   database.
o  Missing piece: Mtrace tells you where the packets are being lost bug 
   not why. Need to know config info (e.g., rate limits) and source of 
   competing traffic. Both these items need to be in multicast MIB but 
   second isn't.
o  What is the current state of the world?
   About 30% of the MBone handles mtrace
   Cisco is shipping mtrace (in 11.0) and is close to having it working
   We almost have the tcl/tk rtpmon done and ready to distribute
The MIB needs work


SNMP management MIB
o  DVMRP MIB changes
   Previously, read-only access to configuration and statistics
o  Additional desired features:
   Remote configuration    
   Routing table count
   Restart mechanism
o  Mstat
   Display SNMP tables
   List groups, statistics
   List all sources for a group, statistics
o  MRtree
   Show actually (S,G) subtree, statistics
o MView
  GUI front end to mtrace, mstat, mrtree, etc.
  Monitor packet/byte counts, rates at tunnel endpoints over domain, etc.


DVMRP 'INFO' messages, Bill Fenner, Xerox
o One message type, can have any number of requests (and potentially 
  commands) in a packet, packet with simple code+length mechanism.
o  Showed an mtrace routing loop and packet loss


Bay, Eric Crowley
o  Router Version 9.00
o  DVMRP
   Supports Pruning
o  IGMP v2
o  Future
   PIM 
CBT
MOSPF?

mrouted new features, PARC, Bill Fenner
o  Unicast style aggregation
o  Allow prevention of transit
o  Leaf/Tree bit propagation
o  Responds to Domain-Wide Queries
o  Longer prune lifetimes (2 hours)  less flood-and-prune traffic
o  Asymmetric metric detection
o  One way link detection
o  Changes DVMRP
Netmasks in prune, graft, graft-ack


Netedge, Thomas Pusateri
o  Added multicast routing to Gated
o  PIM-DM implementation ready for release
o  DVMRP is also in in the release


USC, Deborah Estrin
o  Developed PIM implementation
o  Building multicast border router function


Multicast Rate Limits & Priority Dropping - Steve Deering, Xerox
o  mrouted does provide a rate-limit function
o  mrouted supports priority drop based on UDP port numbers


Administrative Scope Control, Van Jacobson
o  Use SDR to use named administrative scope
o  Coupled with scoped addresses


RED, Van Jacobson
o  Random Early Drop, keep the queue in routers as small as possible
   Widely spaced randomly chosen packets in the queue are discarded
   Occurs when the queue hits a threshold
o  Sampling, drops packets
o  Collects record of samples, is it uniform or bias distribution list
o  Works well for non-aggregated traffic, TCP traffic, and UDP traffic


Next steps for growing/improving the MBone, Steve Deering
o  Encourage native multicasts
o  Repositioning tunnels
o  Using DVMRP metrics through transit PIM clouds
o  Using route aggregation and default routes in DVMRP
o  Scheduling MBone downtime to reconfigure it
o  Ban mrouters that don't support pruning, mtrace, and longest-match 
   routing
o  Configuring and using admin scope boundary
o  Raising the 500 Kbps MBone bandwidth ceiling
o Developing/deploying mcast-capable SLIP/PPP servers