Confirmation

Downtown did change a setting in the switches. They turned on IGMP filtering.

Apparently, this year when we've used Ghostcasting, it has created problems. I quote, "During the Ghost multicast, all ports on every switch I looked at ran a sustained 100% utilization."

They were told that IGMP filtering "would solve the problem by allowing multicast to intended targets and protect the rest of the network." Though the gentleman I'm quoting also mentioned that when he contact Hewlett Packard, "They asked explicitly about Ghost. Apparently, they've had quite a bit of trouble with it due to Norton's non-standard implementation of multicast."

They say: There are a couple of options. 1) configure the Ghost server / client relationship to run in unicast. I'm told Ghost Server has 3 options -- unicast, broadcast, and multicast. Or 2) I can remove IGMP filtering in the 600 wing "one-to-one" switches. Option 2 requires that server and clients run within these 5 switches. Anything more will require research, test, and implementation time and I'll need a clearance for that kind of investment.

Reverting to Unicasting doesn't seem a particularly appealing solution, and there are several reasons option 2 wouldn't work including the fact that a) not all the clients are on those switches and b) the server software only runs on Windows, and no Windows computers are located on those switches.

Until this is resolved, we've been effectively hobbled as far as rolling out the classrooms...

Incidentally, this situation is simply one more symptom of a greater problem of lack of communication that desperately needs to be addressed, and soon.