I have progressed on this front... I found out that multicast is part of the kernel in 2.4 and that the kernel can take care of routing too. However on the MBone in general, it seems that it is not well deployed or let's say "popular". I don't think it is configured by default by ISPs. I will talk about it to our ISP here in Fiji and see what comes out... You can see multicast is not popular by the amount of conferencing applications developed which are not multicast but unicast only. Now it seems that the multicast backbone use PIM while mrouted uses DVMRP. The backbone uses PIM because that's what cisco has implemented (in short). As for the Linux kernel I have no clue which routing protocol is implemented. My guess it is all static routes, which is fine for a end user, except when you want to do a tunnel... Also www.mbone.org links to a search engine and mcast.net does not have a web site. It would be nice to do www.mcast.net and have there a forum for talking about multicast applications. I think ISI.EDU is the owner of this domain which is in use for reverse multi-cast IP. Just a few thoughts... Cheers. Franck Martin Network and Database Development Officer SOPAC South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission Fiji E-mail: franck@sopac.org <mailto:franck@sopac.org> Web site: http://www.sopac.org/ <http://www.sopac.org/> Support FMaps: http://fmaps.sourceforge.net/ <http://fmaps.sourceforge.net/> Certificate: https://www.sopac.org/ssl/ This e-mail is intended for its addresses only. Do not forward this e-mail without approval. The views expressed in this e-mail may not be necessarily the views of SOPAC. -----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley@automagic.org] Sent: Tuesday, 10 September 2002 7:23 To: Franck Martin Cc: ietf@IETF.ORG Subject: Re: MBone > Most documents on the Internet are very old. The mboned page at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mboned-charter.html seems reasonably recent.