Testing Multicast on a Private LANs? 6
SD asks: "I am planning to write and experiment with multicast RTP streaming. I am not sure if my ISP supports multicast at the router level, so I am wondering if there any way I can set up a LAN in my home to experiment with multicast technology." For those of you who don't know what a Multicast network is, you may want to check the HOWTO. It strikes me that building a network to test multicasting would not be something you would want to do in too small of a scale. Without more details about what kind of application is getting tested, what do you feel would be a ballpark numbers (routers, machines, etc) for a network designed for testing multicast applications, and how much would such a thing cost?
More info about Multicasting (Score:1)
AskJeeves Here [ask.com]
MentorTech (PDF) [mentortech.com]
Bob Stein (boatload of good links at the bottom) [earthlink.net]
Not much needed to test multicast (Score:1)
for an incomplete list of supported hardware, or
look for MULTICAST in the output of "ifconfig")
then all you need is a simple ethernet HUB to connect the test systems. If you have an ethernet
SWITCH, it may or may not support multicast.
After that, it is "simply" a matter of writing code which does multicast. Note that if you have
multiple interfaces on a host, you will need to
specify a route for the multicast communication.
Re:Not that simple (Score:2)
The app I work on at work uses multicast - a LOT. The big problem is router issues. Some version of IOS work with multicast, some don't
Sigh
Multicast programming (Score:2)
I am presently working for a company that sells real-time stock market information, and the incoming data feeds from NASDAQ and SIAC (=NYSE) are in multicast format delivered over a private network. So I have a bit of experience with it, although our application doesn't need anything fancy like dynamic routing or supporting a large number of listening clients. I'm using SuSE Linux for some of the application servers, but I've found that OpenBSD is a better solution for routing the data, tunelling it over a secure VPN, etc.
p.s. If you want to know if your ISP supports multicast, just run tcpdump on your gateway and look for multicast or IGMP traffic.
An application for multicasting MP3 audio... (Score:1)
Also, source code libraries for multicast streaming (using RTP) are available here [sourceforge.net] ("LIVE.COM Streaming Media")