Subject: Announcing the 3.9-beta3 release of mrouted

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 19:53:15 PST

Note that this release contains a partial workaround for most of
the instability being seen in the MBone: the "blaster" keyword in
mrouted.conf .  If you have any neighbors running cisco's IOS who
haven't upgraded to a version with CSCdj31841 fixed, you are strongly
encouraged to upgrade to this version of mrouted and use the
"blaster" keyword on any tunnels or phyints on which you peer with
the buggy neighbors.

  Bill

$Id: README-3.9-beta3.mrouted,v 1.1.2.1 1998/03/01 03:00:20 fenner Exp $

	IP Multicast Extensions for BSD-Derived Unix Systems
	Multicast Routing Daemon

	Release 3.9-beta3
	February 28, 1998

	available from parcftp.xerox.com,
	file pub/net-research/ipmulti/beta-test/mrouted3.9-beta3.tar.Z
	binaries:
	pub/net-research/ipmulti/beta-test/mrouted3.9-beta3-sparc-sunos41x.tar.Z
	pub/net-research/ipmulti/beta-test/mrouted3.9-beta3-sparc-solaris2.tar.Z
	pub/net-research/ipmulti/beta-test/mrouted3.9-beta3-i386-freebsd22.tar.Z
	pub/net-research/ipmulti/beta-test/mrouted3.9-beta3-alpha-osf1.tar.Z
	pub/net-research/ipmulti/beta-test/mrouted3.9-beta3-sgi-irix6.tar.Z

Note: The 3.9 release is mrouted-only, and will run on top of a 3.5 kernel.
It is a drop-in replacement for mrouted 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 or 3.8.

NOTE WELL: This is a beta-test release of mrouted.  The basic
functionality has been extensively tested in CAIRN and other
testbeds, but it is expected to have bugs.  Please report bugs to Bill
Fenner <[email-masked]>.

The 3.9-beta3 release fixes the following bugs:
  o There was a bug handling routing updates which caused random black
    holes.

  o There was a race condition in the timer handlers causing free'd memory
    to sometimes get touched.

  o "allow_nonpruners" wasn't allowed in the configuration file (and almost
    nobody noticed! - probably a good sign)

  o When a prune times out and the source has been active "recently",
    mrouted now waits for further traffic instead of triggering a new
    prune.

  o mrouted now ignores unreachable routes when making a routing decision
    (previously it would blackhole, now it can find a less-specific)

The 3.9-beta3 release has the following new features:
  o A "blaster" keyword for mrouted.conf, to turn on handling of routers
    (mostly ciscos) which overwhelm the socket buffers by blasting the
    whole routing table at once.

  o A "notransit" keyword; routes learned on a "notransit" vif will not be
    readvertised onto another "notransit" vif.

  o The 500kbps default rate limit on tunnels has been removed.

  o An ICMP listener which logs ICMP errors which appear to be in response to
    tunnel packets that we sent.

  o A tunnel traffic encapsulator, which encapsulates control traffic
    inside the tunnel instead of unicasting it "beside" the tunnel.
    This is turned off by default; use "beside off" to turn it on.

  o A "force_leaf" flag to ignore any potential neighbors on a given interface.