[nycbug-talk] Noob networking question

[Peter Wright]

> Hello all,
>
> I have a FreeBSD 6.0 atalk (networking for Macintosh) server in a small
> office, and I am getting radically different speeds, from different
> machines (all 100T ethernet connections) even at night when I know I am
> the only one doing anything on the network.
>
> The slowness seems more obvious using appletalk, because to copy a 500MB
> file from one machine to the shared disk took a minute, to copy it from
> the server, behind the switch the copy was asking for several hours.
> And copying it from the server to another machine took 24mins.
>
> Question 1) are there any tools I can use to tune the speed of different
> services (like appletalk) through the network ?

netperf is a usefull tool to measure throughput of network devices:
http://www.netperf.org/netperf/NetperfPage.html
this will not help with atalk though...

on *BSD systat may be helpfull to monitor host specific load
(-vmstat/-ifstat can be helpfull in some situations)

I've used ntop in the past when tying to monitor NFS and atalk usage on
LAN's:

http://www.ntop.org/overview.html

I'm sure there are all sorts of other tool's I'm forgetting...

>
> Question 2) I have a few machines off a switch (linksys 100 baseT) which
> is connected through the uplink port and a crossover to the main
> router/firewall/gateway netgear.  Machines connected to this switch
> (which is new) seem much much slower than the rest.  Is there anything
> I can do about this ?
>

have you checked link state (AutoNeg is bad) and that you are full duplex.
 i dunno, i usually find the basic stuff is a good starting point (check
physical links first etc..).


-pete


-- 
~~oO00Oo~~
Peter Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
www.nomadlogic.org/~pete
310.869.9459