Testing Multicast on a Private LANs?

SD asks: "I am planning to write and experiment with multicast RTP streaming. I am not sure if my ISP supports multicast at the router level, so I am wondering if there any way I can set up a LAN in my home to experiment with multicast technology." For those of you who don't know what a Multicast network is, you may want to check the HOWTO. It strikes me that building a network to test multicasting would not be something you would want to do in too small of a scale. Without more details about what kind of application is getting tested, what do you feel would be a ballpark numbers (routers, machines, etc) for a network designed for testing multicast applications, and how much would such a thing cost?

Comments

Re:Not that simple

[CharlieG]

Wait till you run into some of the classic multi path problems, Cisco bugs etc

The app I work on at work uses multicast - a LOT. The big problem is router issues. Some version of IOS work with multicast, some don't

Sigh

Multicast programming

[mmontour]

If you go here, you can get source code for a simple multicast client and server program. Run a sender on one PC, a receiver on another, then add as many intermediate routers and boxes as you want.

I am presently working for a company that sells real-time stock market information, and the incoming data feeds from NASDAQ and SIAC (=NYSE) are in multicast format delivered over a private network. So I have a bit of experience with it, although our application doesn't need anything fancy like dynamic routing or supporting a large number of listening clients. I'm using SuSE Linux for some of the application servers, but I've found that OpenBSD is a better solution for routing the data, tunelling it over a secure VPN, etc.

p.s. If you want to know if your ISP supports multicast, just run tcpdump on your gateway and look for multicast or IGMP traffic.