Thank you, this is a special sw I cannot give more details, but it needs to broadcast some traffic to all connected users even over WAN, I received from Cisco TAC that 6500 switch doesn't support IRP or broadcasting!! is there any other solution for this problem?

Hello Mohammed,

as Jack said, enabling broadcasts over the WAN by using bridging might saturate your E1 link. You might just want to give it a try and see if the traffic gets through. The config on both sides would look like this:

no ip routing

!

bridge 1 protocol ieee

!

interface Vlan1

bridge-group 1

!

interface serial 0

encapsulation ppp

bridge-group 1

If you run into problems with this, you might want to get in touch with your service provider (the one that provides the E1) and check if you can e.g. implement an MPLS VPN solution instead...

HTH,

GNT

I tried this but no luck! bridging and routing was not supported on this 6500 core switch.

Mohammed

Am I correct in assuming that if it is a 6500 with an E1 that the E1 is on a FLEXWAN card? If so I think that the major issue is that the VLAN switching/bridging happens on the sup but the sup does not see the lines on the FLEXWAN which are accessed from the MSFC.

I am not aware of a solution that meets your requirements on your particular hardware platform.

HTH

Rick

In this case, you may consider to subscribe another WAN service, e.g. Metro Ethernet to overcome this requirement.

Or could you please advise more details that what protocol is using in the application ? Not a standard TCP/IP, DLSW, etc. I suspect the software developer should aware of this kind of limitation. If it is really the requirement, you may consider to purchase a pure bridge (but I don't know can you buy it in the market now) and connect to the 6500 LAN port. It will be much cheaper and simple. Or if you have spare dedicated router, you can also configure it as a bridge to carry the broadcast via WAN.

Hope this helps.

Yes we are redesigning it with two routers on both ends, but with no use of the 6500 core switches, you know the idea simply was that the application needs to send messages and/or packets that should reach all users local and remote.

transporting broadcasts over multicast for specific applications was made exactly for such purposes like yours. So you have independant IP subnets at two or more locations, most of the traffic is routed usual way, but some applications that rely on broadcast are handled in special way: 'ip multicast helper-map' will cause router to listen for broadcast traffic on the interface where it's configured, when matching broadcast packet arrives the router will encapsulate it into multicast packet, send across WAN and then router on the other side will extract data from multicast packet encapsulate them back into broadcast and send out to the LAN.

If you're interested in details of setting this up, please let me know what protocol/port your application uses I'll try to post sample config.