That's better!
2004-09-26 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearEver since I upgraded my main fileserver from RedHat 7.3 to Debian, performance has basically sucked. Somewhat oddly, it showed up mainly on long transfers, reading mail and starting up FireFox in particular, and mainly on slower machines. For a long time I thought it had something to do with NFS file locking (because of the mail) but switching to a non-locking NFS server didn't help.
As it turned out, the problem was one I had seen before: an old, and no longer supported, ethernet card. See, a long time ago a now-defunct company called DEC made one of the best 10/100 ethernet chips, called the "tulip". There was an imitation on the market, nominally compatible, but it required different timings in the driver and wasn't, initially, well-supported under Linux.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and most of DEC gets bought by Compaq, and eventually by HP. Their chip business goes to Intel somewhere along the way, and the tulip gets dropped on the floor (along with the Alpha 64-bit CPU, but we won't go into that). The clones take over, the original tulip driver is now called "old-tulip", and is eventually dropped from the standard installation. A new, non-tulip ethernet card (that cost me all of $4 at Fry's) fixed the problem.
I just backed up roughly 9GB over the network (rsync over ssh) in a little under 3 hours.
As it turned out, the problem was one I had seen before: an old, and no longer supported, ethernet card. See, a long time ago a now-defunct company called DEC made one of the best 10/100 ethernet chips, called the "tulip". There was an imitation on the market, nominally compatible, but it required different timings in the driver and wasn't, initially, well-supported under Linux.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and most of DEC gets bought by Compaq, and eventually by HP. Their chip business goes to Intel somewhere along the way, and the tulip gets dropped on the floor (along with the Alpha 64-bit CPU, but we won't go into that). The clones take over, the original tulip driver is now called "old-tulip", and is eventually dropped from the standard installation. A new, non-tulip ethernet card (that cost me all of $4 at Fry's) fixed the problem.
I just backed up roughly 9GB over the network (rsync over ssh) in a little under 3 hours.
