[svlug] multicast question

[Robert Hajime Lanning]

<quote who="Rick Moen">
> Within a few years, however, despite that excellent volunteer effort,
> the MBONE program fell by the wayside.  I can't remember if this was
> _the_ reason, but I do know that, as ethernet switches supplanted
> hubs, support for ethernet packets addressed to multicast addresses
> became vanishingly rare.  (The whole idea of switches was to
> localise traffic.)

Switches treat multicast traffic like broadcast traffic, unless you
have a smart switch that either does IGMP snooping or can talk to
IGMP aware routers via CGMP.  With a smart switch, the ports that
the multicast traffic is sent to is limited to the ports that
subscribe to a multicast group.

Switches only localise unicast traffic.

-- 
And, did Guloka think the Ulus were too ugly to save?
                                         -Centauri