Hello, I have a NetBSD serving FFSv2 filesystems to various Windows nodes via Samba.
The network efficiency seems to me underpar. There is very probably Samba tuning involved. Windows tuning too. But a question arised to me about miscellaneous speeds of ethernet cards connecting to a card on the NetBSD server able of auto-selecting the speed between 10 to 1000. The Windows boxes are very hetergoneous (one might even say that there are not too same Windows OS versions, because some hardware is quite old) and the cards range from 10 to 1000 able ethernet devices. Needless to say, there is a switch (Cisco) on which all the nodes are connected. When concurrent accesses to an auto-select ethernet card are done by ethernet cards ranging from 10 to 1000 speeds, are is this handled by the card? Is the speed adapted to each connected device? Or does the serving card fix the speed, during a slice of time, for all connexions to the minimum speed? What is the "cost" of switching the speed or, in other words, is connecting a 10base card able to slow done the whole throughput of the card even for other devices---due to the overhead of switching the speed depending on connected devices? (The other question relates to the switch but not to NetBSD: does the switch have a table for the connected devices and buffers the transactions, rewriting the packets to adjust for the speed of each of the devices?). If someone has any clue on the subject, I will be very thankful to learn! TIA, -- Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/ http://www.sbfa.fr/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C