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 | | Developing IP Multicast Networks, Volume I (Networking Technology) by Beau Williamson ISBN-10: 9781578700776 ISBN-10: 1-57870-077-9 ISBN-13: 9781578700776 ISBN-13: 978-1-57870-077-6 Hardcover 1999-10-29 Cisco Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description The definitive guide to designing and deploying Cisco IP multicast networks
Developing IP Multicast Networks, Volume I, covers an area of networking that is rapidly being deployed in many enterprise and service provider networks to support applications such as audio and videoconferencing, distance learning, and data replication. The concepts used in IP multicasting are unlike any other network protocol, making this book a critical tool for networking professionals who are implementing this technology. This book provides a solid foundation of basic IP multicast concepts, as well as the information needed to actually design and deploy IP multicast networks. Using examples of common network topologies, author Beau Williamson discusses the issues that network engineers face when trying to manage traffic flow. Developing IP Multicast Networks, Volume I, includes an in-depth discussion of the PIM protocol used in Cisco routers and detailed coverage of the rules that control the creation and maintenance of Cisco mroute state entries. The result is a comprehensive guide to the development and deployment of IP multicast networks using Cisco routers and switches. | ||
Reviews | ||
Good foundational book, even in 2008 I was skeptical about buying a book this old, but I just finished it and am still slightly amazed at how little has changed in multicast technology in ~8 years. I have read Doyle's multicast coverage, listened to InternetworkExpert's excellent "class on demand" (CoD) on the topic many times, and worked through over half of their 20 CCIE lab scenarios, all of which have multicast sections. This doesn't make me an expert by any means, but I know enough now to recognize that the material in this book is still worth reading. The differences between this book and Doyle's (2004) are: - Williamson dedicates a lot more effort to explaining the mroute table. This was my single biggest stumbling block in multicast routing - Doyle, IMO, gives IGMP a better treatment - Doyle goes over mtrace and mstat - Williamson spreads the information out over more pages via liberal usage of config snips and diagrams, often one per page. This allows him to go into *brutal, painful and excruciating* detail about every line in the mroute table, every flag, every state transition, etc. - Williamson does a more thorough job of explaining exactly what happens in PIM-SM networks (100+ pages to Doyle's ~25) - Doyle goes over Anycast RP and gives a better explanation of MSDN, which appears to have been rather cutting edge when Williamson put finger to keyboard I finished the book in about a week of serious effort, but I skipped the following chapters (Cisco has not put much effort into the technologies described), leaving me with about 400 pages of groovyness: DVMRP CBT MOSPF Connecting to DVMRP Networks and several sections of other chapters To be sure, some things have changed. I didn't see any mention of the "ip pim autorp listener" command, which negates the need for sparse-dense mode when configuring Auto-RP (can't recall if Doyle mentioned that either). Also, in current versions of IOS one *does* need to specify the RP on the RP itself, whereas Williamson (and Doyle) explicitly say this is not the case (they were both right at the time of print, Cisco has changed this). Overall however, I would say that easily >95% of the material is solid here. So which book to buy? Well if you're serious about the CCIE and/or running a multicast network you'll get both, and read them both several times. I do hope Williamson updates the book though, as he alludes to several draft proposals, and gives a "state of the multicast internet" address that I would like to know more about without digging through two dozen RFCs. Also, the few things that have changed would be a boon to the book. | ||
Great Intro to IP Multicast I come from a routing shop - never having a customer need for Multicast. This book brought me up to speed very quickly on the both the beauty and ease of Multicast. As a tool for my CCIE studies, I felt the first 200 pages were of immense value at helping my studies. I felt Chapter 5 (on DVMRP) was not nearly as valuable as Chapters 6 and 7 (on PIM-DM and PIM-SM). Some typos I was able to pick out: page 144 - 2nd line from bottom should read "...it too sends a Graft message to Router C" - not Router D. page 168 - 3rd line on the 1st paragraph should read "...SPT to pull the (S2, G) traffic down to the RP..." - not (S1, G). There are some other typos, but they are few and far between (but I'm not an expert on multicast!). I have heard of this book being talked about as the 'bible' for multicast - I can see why. I give this book 5 pings out of 5: !!!!! | ||
A good overview Multicast has for several years been used in LAN environments to easily exchange information among users, especially in educational and academic research environments. The advent of audio and video conferencing has increased its use in these environments, and it is now making its presence known in WAN and Internet environments. This book gives an overview of the how to implement IP multicast on Cisco devices, and does a good job in that regard. Readers with a general knowledge of networks, even those who have not administered Cisco devices explicitly, can gain much from the book. This reviewer was not interested in the actual implementation of Cisco multicast networks, which is covered in Part 3 of the book, and so this review will concentrate on the other three parts of the book. These parts are mostly descriptive, but they do discuss some of the performance issues involved with the deployment of IP multicast, although nowhere in the book are test cases discussed, even though their inclusion would have been extremely helpful. Multicasting by itself is not a complicated phenomena to understand and use, but when it is deployed over Layer 2 or when coupled with QoS some interesting issues can arise. This reviewer was mostly interested in traffic engineering in multicast environments, and the author spends an entire chapter on this topic. The book begins with a history of multicast and the MBone, the latter of which is a collection of Internet routers and hosts that are interconnected and are able to forward IP multicast traffic. IP multicast is of course an unreliable transmission mechanism, based as it is on UDP. Along with stating the assigned scope of the multicast addresses over IP, the author also reviews the scheme for multicast MAC addressing. The MAC address mapping will cause a CPU performance hit though since the CPU will have to be interrupted in order to deal with all 32 of the IP multicast groups. This arises since the IP multicast address information cannot be mapped into the available space of the MAC address space. There is a 32:1 address ambiguity when an IP multicast address is mapped to a MAC address. One can summarize the properties of the multicast routing protocols discussed in the book straightforwardly: PIM (Protocol Independent Multicasting) can run in three different modes, namely Dense (DM), Sparse (SM) and Sparse-Dense. A router will always forward multicast traffic on a dense mode interface unless all the PIM neighbors of the interface prune themselves from the multicast tree. Multicast traffic will be forwarded on a sparse mode interface only if at least one of the PIM neighbors explicitly joins the multicast tree. In sparse-dense mode, the interface can be running in sparse mode for some groups and dense mode for others. There is a "hello interval" for PIM multicast which is the frequency at which the router will send PIM query messages, the latter of which are used for selecting a PIM designated router. The PIM designated router is responsible for sending IGMP (v1) queries. Bootstrap messages can be forwarded from an interface in PIMv2. This allows all PIM-SM routers in a domain to dynamically learn all Group-to-RP mappings.In PIM-DM, the multicast traffic is periodically forwarded even on pruned interfaces of a source-based distribution tree. This allows the learning of membership changes. This 'state-refresh interval' can be configured on the first-hop routers of the multicast source, allowing the interface to periodically send a state refresh control message down the source-based distribution tree. When doing multicast in an NBMA (NonBroadcast MultiAccess) network, a router will replicate multicast packets for all neighbors configured for broadcast (actually pseudobroadcast to use the author's characterization). To avoid this, one can configure the router in NBMA mode, which will then only allow the replication of packets for PIM neighbors. NBMA mode is only supported by Cisco for SM networks. DVMRP (Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol) does neighbor discovery, where network routing information is exchanged between neighbors. This information consists of Route Report messages that advertise a source network and a hop-count. DVMRP generates two routing tables, one is a multicast routing table to the receivers and a unicast routing table to the sources. When forwarding, a DVMRP router will use the unicast table for RPF (Reverse Path Forwarding) checks and the multicast table for forwarding multicast packets. When doing unicast routing, the router will use the unicast table for the RPF check, but will use a different multicast routing protocol for forwarding multicast packets. There is a metric value associated with a DVMRP unicast route, which is the sum of the interface metrics of a route between the router originating the report and the router in the source network. For multicast traffic, one can control bandwidth with: 1. Aggregate rate limiting, which sets an upper bound for all multicast traffic being sent on an interface. 2. Mroute table entries wherein each individual multicast stream is set to a maximum rate. 3. `Scoped zones' and multicast boundaries, which prevent multicast traffic with a high rate from traveling outside the provisioned regions. Doing actual multicast traffic engineering is complicated do to the need for calculating the proper RPF (Reverse Path Forwarding) interface (and not the destination IP address). The author discusses in detail some of the techniques that can be used, such as GRE tunnels and `pseudo load-sharing.' GRE tunnels are used to do load-splitting of multicast traffic, which cannot be done otherwise since multicast is allowed only one incoming interface. He also describes how to do traffic conversion between broadcast and multicast, this being allowed for Cisco IOS 11.1 or later. This is a useful capability for networks where the source or the receivers, or both, do not support IP multicast. | ||
May well be the best multicasting book available Multicasting is truly a technology solution in search of a problem. Excepting highly specialized conferencing applications (a few of which are mentioned here) it is difficult to see how multicasting can be a money-making service for carriers and providers, and the protocols have yet to really penetrate to wide deployment. That said, knowledge of this separate realm of IP networking is a must for any professional in the telecom space. I'm glad to say that this book rewards determined scrutiny. As a technical writer supporting a very complex product line that has recently added PIM-SM to its bag of tricks, I've found this book painstaking and tremendously informative. You will need to understand IP networking before approaching this title; on the assumption that you do, you will fully understand shared trees, SPTs, and their combination in PIM to an absolute fare-thee-well. My focus when reading this book was on IGMP and PIM-SM, so I have not read absolutely every page of this title. However, Williamson breaks the processes down packet-by-packet for each protocol in the multicasting suite in almost excruciating detail. Advanced coverage of topics such as registration, pruning, and Rendezvous Point behavior means that you will have complete mastery of Cisco multicasting, and for any platform that conforms to the standards, by the time you are finished. This is an excellent, excellent effort in what I think is a consistently solid networking series. | ||
Absolutely the best Multicast book available This is the best multicast book on the market. It is a must have whether you are preparing for the CCIE Lab or just want to understand multicast. The explanation was simple and clear. There are tons of configuration examples covering pretty much all kinds of scenarios. The author actually explained every single line of the configurations. I bought this book for my Lab exam, and after two days of reading, 99.99% of my questions were answered (the only one I still have is I actually made PIM-DM work in a hub-spoke frame relay network. The prune message from one spoke was actually seen by the other spoke, I don't know why the hub would forward it out). I have to admit this is one of the best books I've read for a long time. Just like Jeff Doyle's TCP/IP Routing is the Bible of IGP, this book is the Bible of Multicast. | ||