Man alive, what did I do to my network?

After getting Ubuntu to stream audio to an Apple Stereo Express unit, I began to fiddle with PulseAudio's settings in an attempt to eliminate the audio skips, and or to increase the audio buffer. Thinking no further about it, as it wasn't handling the audio the way I wanted, I gave up, settling for Pandora.com through the local speakers. Besides, why am I fiddling with this? I have other things I should be doing!

Moments later Pandora.com ceased to work. After unplugging and rebooting every network device I had without success, I ran ping in a terminal to see the time:

ping 192.168.0.1


The ping replies were exponentially stacking up in time and all seemed to be puking on the main router. If that wasn't enough, my roomate came out with his laptop and lots of questions.

This command showed a bazillion entries, which I could google and get some idea where it's coming from:


tcpdump


Tcpdump revealed batches of lines: 224.0.0.56.46668: UDP, length 1292. After googling it, apparently, it's RTP Multi-cast related with PulseAudio and the network couldn't get rid of the multi-cast packets fast enough. After doing some looking, I found where I had turned Multi-cast on and disabled it.

Problem went away, but what a scare! Don't even try turning on RTP Multi-Cast unless you know what you're doing!!!

Yeah yeah, I know...  "if it aint broke, don't fix it!" :P