Hi Josh - I'm sorry about the late reply on this - I tried to find it in my ag-tech mail but didn't see it there, wonder if it bounced somewhere. Anyway:
> We are trying to set up a local bridging service adjacent to our wide > area router so that AG traffic will be unicast on our lan. I would > like to get some information and advice about how to proceed. In no > particular order here are the questions issues we are grappling with: > 1. Will this work ? The plan is to set up a box which will > bridge all of the AG traffic for our site. We will configure > our switches to allow multicast between the router and this > box but not between the router and the rest of our lan. Yes, that sounds like a good solution. > 2. If we do this will the bridge have to participate in all > venues that we might want to participate or will it only have > to participate in the venues we happen to be visiting at any > given moment. What do you mean by participate in? If you mean "join the multicast group", I believe the way it works is that the bridge will only join the group when a unicast user enters the venue. > 3. Should we be running our own venue server on this bridge node > ? Will this help or hinder us in our unicast goals ? No, I don't see any need to do that (I'm assuming you are running a venue server elsewhere on your network). > 4. How good a computer to we need for this purpose ? It depends in some extent on the number of bridge users you are supporting; however, I'm sure a reasonably recent 1Ghz + Pentium box will serve well (the ANL MSB bridge ran for a long time on PIII/600 box, and before that on an even smaller machine). You'll want 100Mbit etheret, or 1G if possible (mostly for headroom; I don't anticipate you'll see nearly that much traffic, unless the HD folks start doing AG multicasting :-). > 5. Should it run windows or linux ? Linux; I don't believe we support Windows for bridge servers yet. --bob
