Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 12:07:24 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Alex <xela@battleface.com> Subject: Re: suffering from poor network performance... Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1031218120537.54191A-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <200312172047.47311.wes@softweyr.com>
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On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Wes Peters wrote: > On Tuesday 16 December 2003 03:35 pm, Charles Swiger wrote: > > On Dec 16, 2003, at 5:58 PM, Alex (ander Sendzimir) wrote: > > > I have a small home network with a PowerBook G4 and FBSD 4.9-STABLE > > > connected through a Netgear DS108 hub (10/100). > > > > If the device works at both 10 and 100 speed, it's a switch, not a hub. > > This is one of those curious half-breed thingys that were popular for a > year or so before the prices of switches fell through the floor. It's > essentially a 10Base-T hub and a 100Base-TX hub in the same box, a > relatively simple switch at each port connects "partitions" you the 10 > or 100 mbps portion. They're odd little beasts, you can sniff traffic > on them, but only traffic at the same speed you're running at. If you > have two 100Base machines yakking away and try to sniff them from a > 10Base machine, you won't see anything. > > These were typically sold as "Dual Speed" hubs, thus the "DS" in the > product id. I had one of these, and had terrible problems: if there was much traffic on the 100mbps side, the 10mbps side essentially got cut off from the 100mbps side. Apparently it starved something inside the hub, because traffic basically didn't move from the 100mbps side to the 10mbps side even when it was supposed to. Can't really think of a good reason why that would be the case, since 10/100 switches generally don't have too many problems with that, but it was a disaster. I ended up buying more 100mbps cards leaving only a printer at 10mbps, where interactive performance wasn't an issue. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects robert@fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research
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