[lug] Multicast packets?

[D. Stimits]

"Atkinson, Chip" wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know what things use multicast packets?  Specifically I'm trying
> to find out why my machine has outages with the network.  Upon looking at
> the problem I see blasts of multicast packets as reported by ntop.  I'm just
> in a "typical" corporate network.  I believe that the outage is caused
> because the network is 100Mb/s whereas my machine is 10Mb/s and the
> translation is done by the hub I'm connected to.  This then means that the
> data being sent out by the 100Mb/s machines basically overwhelms my machine.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Chip

Do you have any "broadcast" style programs running in your network, such
as a radio station broadcasting to multiple users? The idea is a single
packet being marked for a large set of ip addresses, thus letting a
single packet server all of those people at once, instead of independent
connections to all users, along with independent packets. Another
example is if your net has an internal television setup for educational
programming that can be received by anyone.