How to Block IGMP Multicast Flood on a WLAN When Watching Telus Optik TV (IPTV)

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After being a Shaw TV and Internet customer for several years, I recently made the switch to Telus Optik TV and Telus Optik High Speed Turbo Internet. While I’m very happy with both the Optik TV and Internet so far, there have been a few bumps along the way. For example, the other day I hooked up a DD-WRT powered wireless router to the network and experienced an IGMP multicast packet flood when I turned on the TV. In this article I show you how to use ebtables to block an IGMP multicast packet flood on a DD-WRT WLAN when watching IPTV.

What is Telus Optik TV and Internet?

Telus Optik TV is the fancy marketing name for Telus’ IPTV service. Telus Optik High Speed Turbo Internet is the fancy marketing name for Telus’ VDSL internet service. The two services are closely related in that they are delivered into your home over the same physical line. Once that line enters your home, it is connected to a VDSL modem-router combination device, which is responsible for delivering both services to your computers, television set-top boxes (STB) and personal video recorders (PVR).

Currently, Telus uses the Actiontec V1000H VDSL Modem Router as the VDSL endpoint device. Because both the IPTV and internet are delivered over the same physical medium, they share bandwidth. One of the V1000H’s main jobs is to manage this sharing so that you can watch high definition TV programs while simultaneously downloading files and surfing the internet. For the most part, the Actiontec does a great job of this sharing as I have not noticed any glitches with the TV while downloading big files.

In addition to being a modem and a router, the V1000H is also a wireless-N WiFi access point. By default, the V1000H’s WLAN is bridged to its (wired) LAN so that they share the same subnet addressing scheme (192.168.1.0/24) and broadcast domain. As far as I know, you can’t put the WLAN on a different subnet than the LAN and you can’t change the subnet addressing scheme either (unless, perhaps, you hack the V1000H or put an unsupported firmware on it).

Anyway, as I said at the start of this article, I like Optik TV and Internet but there have been some problems here and there, one of which is IGMP multicast floods.

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    5 comments to How to Block IGMP Multicast Flood on a WLAN When Watching Telus Optik TV (IPTV)

    • Jimbo

      Thanks for taking some of the mystery out of Telus Optik TV.

    • Bryan

      Awesome tutorial!! Thank you been looking for ages to be able to get rid of the crappy Dlink wireless G router that Telus supplied with my Linksys e3200 & DD-wrt firmware!

    • Marko

      Very nice tutorial. I could’t wait to get rid of different subnets. Tried all sorts of “iptables” but no luck. Until i came across your page. Million thanks for this…

    • mike

      create write up – however multicast is still flooding my wifi/network – i am using dd-wrt with wzr buffalo router (the etables is in the kernal)

      any suggestions?

    • Marko Kukovec

      insmod ebtables
      insmod ebtable_filter
      insmod ebt_pkttype
      ebtables -A FORWARD -o “eth1″ –pkttype-type multicast -j DROP
      ebtables -A OUTPUT -o “eth1″ –pkttype-type multicast -j DROP

      On the first ebtables command I GET ‘The kernel doesn’t support a certain ebtables extension, consider recompiling your kernel or insmod the extension.’

      lsmod | grep ebt

      reveals only

      root@DD-WRT:~# lsmod | grep ebt
      ebtable_filter 928 0 (unused)
      ebtables 23920 1 [ebtable_filter]

      So there is no ‘ebt_pkttype’ kernel module. I tried to find it with no luck

      root@DD-WRT:~# find / -name ‘*ebt*’
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_arpnat.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_dnat.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_ip.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_mark.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_mark_m.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_redirect.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebt_snat.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebtable_filter.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebtable_nat.o
      /lib/modules/2.4.37/ebtables.o
      /usr/sbin/ebtables

      So where can I get this missing modules for my kernel version? Please don’t tell me I have to compile dd-wrt modules to add those modules.

      With regards,
      Marko

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