Hansang Bae asked a great question.
I have hung myself by setting up Mulitcast on a device in a legacy (FAT
LARGE ) network. In doing so i only thought about L3.. well multicast
uses the same L2 flag as bcast.!!!!!
On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 19:22 -0500, Hansang Bae wrote:
> joans4nz wrote:
> > I'm a network administrator in my new job and when I ran Wireshark I saw
> > to much ARP traffic level and Ntop show 86% broadcast traffic to.
> >
> > There are DHCP server and 350 Windows stations. My boss dont know
> > nothing about networks and I propose to my boss buy a layer 3 switch and
> > create vlans to reduce the broadcast traffic levels, but my boss ask
> > what must be the normal levels of broadcast traffic in the LAN network. I have search in google and I can't find a good response
> > to that question, I feel bad without a good answer and reference.
> >
> > Could any in the list help me please?
> >
> > Thanks for your time and excuse my english.
>
>
> Is there a problem you want to resolve? The days of users firing up
> Doom (pre 1.1) and killing 486 based PCs because of broadcast packets is
> long gone. Where did you capture from? 86% of TOTAL traffic on your
> network is broadcast? Or just what you are seeing on your port? Are
> you running any multicast based apps that is being reported as broadcast?
>
> The CCDA design numbers Stewart posted is not really something that
> should guide you. One can argue all day about legitimacy of those
> numbers.
>
>
