This article applies to all Easy Managed Smart Switches with an Easy Smart user interface (UI), including the Nighthawk S8000 model GS808E switch, for which this article was originally written. For an article that applies to Easy Managed Smart Switches with a traditional UI, see What are multicast and IGMP snooping and how do I configure these features on an Easy Smart Managed Switch using a traditional user interface?
Multicast traffic is network traffic that is addressed to a group of IP addresses instead of to a single address. IP multicast is most often used for streaming media, such as video and voice over IP (VoIP). However, multicast traffic can slow your network by flooding all switch ports with all multicast traffic, even if the device connected to a particular port doesn’t care about the traffic or can’t do anything with it.
Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping allows the switch to forward multicast traffic intelligently. Based on the IGMP query and report messages, the switch forwards traffic only to the ports that request the multicast traffic rather than to all ports. IGMP snooping helps to optimize multicast performance and is especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as online media streaming. Depending on the Easy Managed Smart Switch model, IGMP snooping is either enabled or disabled by default.
If you want to block even more multicast traffic and reduce your risk of a denial of service (DoS) attack, you can choose to block multicast traffic from unknown addresses. By default, traffic from unknown addresses is allowed.
In rare circumstances, such as when you are having trouble with a streaming application, you might want to turn off IGMP snooping temporarily or allow traffic from unknown multicast addresses.
To configure IGMP snooping and multicast on an Easy Managed Smart Switch using the Easy Smart UI:
- Log in to a NETGEAR Easy Smart Managed Switch with an Easy Smart UI:
- Connect your computer to the same network as the switch.
You can use a WiFi or wired network connection, or connect directly to a switch that is off-network using an Ethernet cable. - Launch a web browser.
- In the address field of your web browser, enter the IP address of the switch.
For more information, see How do I access the device UI of my NETGEAR Easy Smart Managed Switch?
The login page displays. - Enter the switch password.
The password is the one that you specified the first time that you logged in. The password is case-sensitive.
The HOME page displays.
- Connect your computer to the same network as the switch.
- From the menu at the top of the page, select SWITCHING.
- From the menu on the left, select MULTICAST.
- Turn on the IGMP Snooping toggle to enable IGMP snooping.
The toggle is located to the right and displays green. - Enable or disable the blocking of unknown multicast traffic by clicking the Block Unknown Multicast Address toggle:
- Enable: Unknown multicast traffic is blocked. The toggle is located to the right and displays green.
- Disable: Unknown multicast traffic is allowed. The toggle is located to the left and displays gray.
- Click the APPLY button.
Your settings are saved.