[c-nsp] multicast issue

[Chris Marget]

> I manage a network where multicast is the most important traffic and
> sometimes I get issue by customer where they state that some packets are lost…

I used to manage a the network for a very large financial firm, had to
deal with this sort of issue all the time.

I had optical taps in multiple spots in the environment. The most
important ones collected data at the edge and at the server handoff.

These taps fed into a Niksun appliance which wrote full packets to
disk. Niksun is a powerful box, but I used it primarily to deliver
pcaps, not so much for its analysis features.

Analysis was done with some stuff that I'd whipped up, because I
couldn't find any off-the-shelf products that gave useful visibility
into what was happening on the wire.
Case study of a "missing packets" incident here: http://bit.ly/13jjP7z
A video highlighting my analysis tool here: http://bit.ly/ygf8EG

/chris