What methods can I use to protect our network from broadcast and multicast storms?
What methods can I use to protect our network from broadcast and multicast storms? This is seen when Norton Ghost is run on our network.
This is increasingly becoming a big problem for many organizations. A "broadcast storm" results in performance degradation and often causes Network choking. These storms come from errors or a network loop and may be created by an application on one node. Most of the switches now allow network admins to enable or disable broadcast/Multicast storm control and to set a threshold level at which control applies. These units allow individual port control. This means if the rate at which broadcasts arrive at a port exceeds a defined limit, the switch will block such packets at that port until the rate decreases to a lower threshold. Switches often auto-negotiate baud rate and on such devices broadcast storm control is scaled with the baud rate.
Precautions you can take are:
- Check to see if there are more than one frame type on the servers, routers etc. If the answer is yes, verify if all the applications and /or protocol on the network can run on a single frame type. Using a single frame type reduces the redundant broadcast traffic.
- Check to see if your network is using multiple protocols. Try configuring your applications to one single protocol. Minimizing the number of protocols can lead to fewer broadcasts.
- If possible disable the Spanning tree bridge protocol. Any misconfiguration of the same can lead to broadcast storm.
- Make sure your WAN/Edge network devices have spoofing and /or filtering enabled. Almost every router/ Switch today has the functionality for storm control.
- Use Network Analyzers to perform network baseline analysis. It will define the type of protocols implemented, identify the problematic nodes/areas and also provide other pertinent information relating to network performance at all the layers.
- Enable QoS on your routers. The mapping of the protocol is very important. Packet Shapers do a good job in defining the QoS policies by analyzing the network traffic based on ToS and Frames.