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Preserving Multicast Performance by Disabling Response to the ping Utility

The ping utility uses ICMP Echo messages to verify connectivity to any device with an IP address. However, in the case of multicast applications, a single ping sent to a multicast address can degrade the performance of routers because the stream of packets is replicated multiple times.

You can disable the router's response to ping (ICMP Echo) packets sent to multicast addresses. The system responds normally to unicast ping packets.

To disable the router's response to ping packets sent to multicast addresses:

  1. Include the no-multicast-echo statement:
    [edit system]user@host# set no-multicast-echo
  2. Verify the configuration by checking the echo drops with broadcast or multicast destination address field in the output of the show system statistics icmp command.
    user@host> show system statistics icmp
    icmp:
    0 drops due to rate limit
    0 calls to icmp_error
    0 errors not generated because old message was icmp
    Output histogram:
    echo reply: 21
    0 messages with bad code fields
    0 messages less than the minimum length
    0 messages with bad checksum
    0 messages with bad source address
    0 messages with bad length
    100 echo drops with broadcast or multicast destination address
    0 timestamp drops with broadcast or multicast destination address
    Input histogram:
    echo: 21
    21 message responses generated

Modified: 2015-07-31