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Personal venue server, public reflector service and multicast/unicast bridging
Personal venue server, public reflector service and multicast/unicast bridging
- Hi Jason!
I'm currently having a private venue server for my organisation to connect to. But to save bandwidth, we are using a public reflector service (e.g. reflector.conferencexp.net). Some of my clients have multicast access while some only have unicast access.
So here's the situation: When a conference is run, the unicast client connect to both the reflector and the venue, while the multicast client connects only to the venue. Sometimes, I noticed the multicast client can receive all video streams without connecting to reflector, but sometimes they MUST connect to the reflector to receive all video streams. Is there any explanation for this random behaviour?
All Replies
I have no real explanation, but I have seen multicast fail in many random ways. I suspect that there is still part of the multicast infrastructure you are using that has some bugs. For example, some years ago we had a bug that would affect multicast, and would appear regularly about a week after the router was rebooted. The short term fix was to have the net admin reboot the router for me on a regular schedule. After a couple months of this they got a patch from the vendor that fixed the bug. Also, bugs that cause multicast to fail in one direction, but not the other still seem pretty common.
My best advice is to get to know your network administrator and complain when things aren't working.
Good luck!
Fred
