[Xorp-users] Multicast Routing on Windows

Martin Goldstone m.j.goldstone at isc.keele.ac.uk
Fri May 15 10:16:34 PDT 2009


Hi all,

I'm currently having an issue involving multicast, OSPF and Windows 
Server 2003. We have a software deployment system (Windows only, I'm 
afraid) that uses multicast, and I need to use OSPF on the servers in 
order to provide some form of fail-over (in the form of a service 
address, either added as an additional address to the main network 
connection, or a vmware network card that goes nowhere).  I've started 
out by looking at Routing and Remote Access, which does the OSPF part of 
things fine (after a little tweak to our Cisco routers), however as the 
box now has 2 interfaces, and the software deployment system is bound to 
the service address, multicast fails as the traffic is not routed 
between the 2 interfaces. Sadly, Windows lacks any multicast routing 
protocols (it has IGMP, but no support for PIM, which is what all the 
Cisco routers speak here).  As I understand it, that would be fine if we 
just had a receiver on the Windows end, but it doesn't seem to work with 
the sender being there.

So, after getting rather frustrated with Windows, I decided to take a 
look at Xorp.  Originally, I wanted to just rip Rounting and Remote 
Access out, and get Xorp to do the OSPF stuff in the first instance. 
This proved to be difficult, as I was unable to get 1.6 or 1.5 to start 
at all (first warning about a route via unknown interface, then they 
complain about an assertion (vifp != null, I believe) failing, then they 
quit), but I managed to get 1.4 started, but failed to get OSPF working 
in the way I needed it to (it seems it was working to a degree, as I 
could see it as a neighbour on the Cisco kit, and I could see the 
routing table from OSPF in Xorp, but for some reason, the route to the 
service address wasn't being exposed, thus leaving it inaccessible).

 From this point I decided to go back to Routing and Remote Access, and 
had it running doing OSPF while I tried to convince Xorp to just do the 
multicast stuff.  Sadly all 3 versions complained about not having an 
RTMv2 pipe available.  I found the source code for the relevant dll in  
contrib/win32/xorprtm, convinced it to compile (using the suggested 
Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, and the Windows Server 2003 R2 Platform SDK, 
after having to add some #include lines to bsdroute.h), and put that in, 
at which point I was able to get Xorp running again. It's at this point 
I hit what seems to be my final roadblock, and sadly it wasn't in the 
release notes (though I've since found it in the build notes): Multicast 
routing is not supported on Windows.

So at the moment, I'm stuck.  I'm wondering if it's possible to just get 
Xorp to handle the PIM stuff on it's own, though to be honest, I don't 
know enough about multicast to know if that would be sufficient.

Does anyone have any ideas about a solution to this mess?  Aside from 
using a different operating system, of course, as I'm stuck with Windows 
on this one.

Thanks in advance,

Martin

-- 
Martin Goldstone		Keele University, Keele,
IT Systems Administrator	Staffordshire, United Kingdom, ST5 5BG
Finance & IT			Telephone: +44 1782 734457 

"I feel a great disturbance in the network, as if millions of
processes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"
						Boyd Duffee

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