Re: PCMCIA Ethernet speeds
>
> (I posted this on the debian-user list, but I never got a response.
> Maybe, the folks here can shed some light since it's PCMCIA related...)
>
>
> I've been fooling around with a 2.2 Debian distribution on a ThinkPad
> T20 (company laptop, *cough*), and the network transfers on my home
> LAN are really slow. After spending a few hours going through Deja
> and various HOW-TO's, I'm running out of hairs to pull...
>
> - The file transfers work fine when I boot Win98 up on the laptop so
> the network hardware should be ok.
>
> - I'm using a LinkSys PCMCIA card that's supposed to be NE2K based,
> and cardmgr recognizes it as such. Nothing seems to be amiss in the
> syslog with respect to picking up the card.
>
> - I was monitoring the eth0 interface with ifconfig, and the bigger
> the files, the worse the collisions become. A small file or info
> requests are fairly collision free, but transferring a 2.5 MB file
> will give me collisions of around 17-25% of the packets received.
> But the laptop is only negligibly competing for hub time vs. the
> other computers on the LAN .
>
> - I've tried excluding certain IRQs from the card in case there was a
> hardware conflict, but after excluding 3,4, 7, and 11, I'm starting
> to think that this isn't the issue.
I've usually found myself knocking out 3,4 (serial) 7 (parallel) and 5 (sound).
I haven't usually needed to knock out 11. I do like to check the CMOS setup
and if it has some sort of setting about being "plug and play" to turn that
off. It basically gives the beast permission to hop around during flight,
which certainly isn't what Linux wants.
(A good indicator that plug-n-pray is your problem btw, is if you boot into
MSwin and "it's fine" then warm reboot into Linux and "it's fine" but cold
boots into Linux don't work.)
If you have the wrong netmask, even if your gateway is right and you're inside
the range that you express, it can screw up the ability for bits to get back
to you.
Finally, you might also check if you're accidentally getting the same IP
address as someone else on your segment, or the same MAC address as a card on
your segment. (This is fairly rare, but some very old inboard cards allow
the sysadmin to set the MAC address by jumpers, and newer stacks such as linux
allow changing the MAC announced.)
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
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