videolan over alcatel switches

[Frank Marchese]

We are looking for someone who has experience with running videolan over Alcatel switches. I believe we are having problems with switch settings that are causing the VLC client to freeze after about 7 hours receiving streaming video from VLS.

Just to see whether videolan may be the problem we set up two simple experiments, 1) a VLS server and single VLC client on a closed network, 2) a VLS server and single VLC client on a vlan. Each pair of computers were identically configured:

client: Dell Pentium 4, 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, 64MB video, MS Windows 2000 Professional, vlc 0.62.

Server: Dell Pentium 4, 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, 64MB video, Mandrake 9, vls 0.5 server software, pvr250.

Experiments were run through December 2003 and January 2004...

Results:
The two machines in the closed network were connected through a netgear 10/100 switch (about $80). The server continuously sent mpeg2 video, 24hrs/day for over 30 days to the VLC client. The server finally froze on the 31st day.

On the vlan, running over the alcatel switches, the client froze about every 6-7 hours, and required restarting.

Our network administrators believe Videolan to be the problem. We believe that the Alactel switches are the problem. The network administrators have most experience with streaming video and videoconferencing over Cisco switches. They want input from an external source before they bring the Alcatel reps in to look at the switches.

Thanks
Frank Marchese

[snis]

Hi Frank,

If your aren't using the newest Alcatel switches (66xx, 7x00, 8800).
Then I would say that your primary problem is that the port blocks the traffic, because it thinks you are flooding the ports.
This is because multicast is handled like a broadcast on switches, and to much broadcast on one port will trigger the flood limit.
Type the following commands:

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fls

fls is short for "Flood Limit Show"

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flc <group/vlan number>

flc is short for "Flood Limit Configure"
if you type 0 (zero) as the limit you will disable flood limit for the VLAN.

To make the older Alcatel switches Multicast aware you need the "IPMS.img" file on the flash of the switch. This image file will enable IP Multicast Snooping. If you don't have this file on the flash, then the switch will send the multicast stream out on all ports. In other words, it will not understand "join" and "leave" commands sent by the multicast client.
After installing thin .img file by typing the command:

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imcfg

You may also want to add the following line to your mp?.cmd file:

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bslLearnMcPkt=1

If you don't have this command line then every multicast packet will be handled by the switch CPU.

I Hope this helps.

[Gibalou]

Just another suggestion. Try to update your VLC clients to 0.7.1.
There is a known problem with 0.7.0 where the video part (audio would keep playing fine) could get frozen when receiving corrupted streams.