From owner-freebsd-hardware Wed Oct 9 19:45:19 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id TAA03228 for hardware-outgoing; Wed, 9 Oct 1996 19:45:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from GndRsh.aac.dev.com (GndRsh.aac.dev.com [198.145.92.241]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA03215 for ; Wed, 9 Oct 1996 19:45:11 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from rgrimes@localhost) by GndRsh.aac.dev.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id TAA08147; Wed, 9 Oct 1996 19:44:43 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" Message-Id: <199610100244.TAA08147@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> Subject: Re: Poor SMC Etherpower 10/100 transfer rates In-Reply-To: <325C3D9B.446B9B3D@whistle.com> from Julian Elischer at "Oct 9, 96 05:04:43 pm" To: julian@whistle.com (Julian Elischer) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 19:44:42 -0700 (PDT) Cc: jas@flyingfox.COM, John.McLaughlin@acucobol.ie, hardware@freebsd.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL25 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hardware@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > Jim Shankland wrote: > > > ballpark 3% of the theoretical maximum capacity); the FreeBSD > > box is reporting a 20%+ collision rate! I will now definitely > > try swapping out the SMC card. > > if it is reporting collisions then it's probably not teh culprit.. > it's the card that doesn't see ANY collisions thatyou should be > worried about. Actually it does see the collisions, it is failing to listen to the wire _before_ it transmits, but it sees the collision occur just fine, backs off and then smashes the wire again without seeing if it is busy :-(. Generally just poke around and see if other nodes are reporting collisions higher than expected tells you that you have someone who is not listening before transmitting. I have seen this on cards other than the DEC DC21x4x based ones, but that has been some time ago. This condition is often refered to has ``a balagerant mau'' and a common cause of it use to be thick ethernet MAU's that had gone bad and where not driving the collision pair in the AUI cable. Since with 10BaseT wiring this is all on the card you don't have a seperate MAU, perhaps this should now be called ``a balagerant NIC'' :-). -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com