Well, all the things which make the DECnet stuff painfully burdensome in a
simple environment like mine, turn around, I'm told, and make a more complex
and larger environment work better. Perhaps your system will benefit from
the presence of multiple protocols and layers. It doesn't look, from your
description, like a single segment. However, for my purposes, it's a single
segment if, without any intervening layers (other than the physical ones)
all stations can directly "see" one another, particularly, of course, the
collisions. Generally, people split up segments when the collision overhead
gets too large. It's hard to make that show up with half a dozen stations.
If you do as I did, by dumping vast quantities of highly dense data all at
once, you'll see the overhead rise.
When I got my 100 MHz stuff I was told by the tech support guy at Netgear,
an avid LINUX user, that I'd be best reducing the number of protocols
supported on my setup, so I deleted all references to Microsoft's NETBEUI.
I'm not sure it made things better or faster, but it hasn't hurt anything.
My setup is based on a NETWARE server, though, so I can't punt IPX/SPX and
the Windows boxes like to talk TCP/IP. Since I'm using that for WAN-ing, I
might as well make that the default. Now, if I could just find a TCP/IP
driver set for DOS that's not bigger than the NOVELL stuff . . .
Perhaps you could reduce the number of protocols a bit. It doesn't always
make a lot of difference, but you never know . . .
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh_at_aracnet.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Sunday, November 14, 1999 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: Effective Speed of 10BaseT
>>there were no ack's and no error management of any kind over the LAN.
IIRC,
>>Appletalk sends occasional traffic over an otherwise idle LAN. I don't
know
>>whether it does this when there really is traffic.
>
>Yes, Appletalk does send a little over the network even when nothing is
>going on, but not as bad as DECnet. Since I've got AppleTalk, DECnet,
>Samba, and TCP/IP all running on the same network I've probably got a
>pretty noisy.
>
>Hmmm, just ran a 'tcpdump' and it looks like I'm taking a hit on the
>network just by having a couple Appletalk shares mounted from the VMS box,
>about 56-bytes minimum every couple seconds.
>
>>The numbers you quote seem a mite low, but not embarassingly so. You are
>>configured as a single segment, are you not?
>
>Not sure how you mean a single segment, there are two hub's attached to the
>switch, as well as computers, plus I've got a 10Base2 converter and
>localtalk converter (for the HP 5MP Laserjet) plugged into it.
>
>Guess I'll have to turn on FTP on the DEC3000, and see what kind of speeds
>I get that way. Besides I want to get FTP and NFS turned on anyway.
>
> Zane
>| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator |
>| healyzh_at_aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast |
>| healyzh_at_holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector |
>+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
>| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
>| and Zane's Computer Museum. |
>| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Received on Sun Nov 14 1999 - 21:49:17 GMT