WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN -
Could be a very suitable subtitle for this query story, which took me a lot of work,
mainly in vain...
When I received the message below from Pedro Pablo, I was already busy compiling a new
kernel with the latest IPTABLES.
Being my first attempt in the world of kernel compilation, this of course
took a lot of time and attempts, before I had some halfway decent solution running on
a test server. Finally it worked out, but alas I lost half of my boot logging due to
some SuSE specialities (blogd..) which upon Linus Torvalds advice was lo longer
available in kernel 2.4.18, but that is a different story. I did the setup on a test
server, and FTP was now running smoothly at full speed.
With that in mind, I repeated the entire compile business on the production server -
but again, FTP was not satisfying - same trouble.
Then finally I considered Pedro Pablo's note. As the problem also occurred when
running FTP client from the server itself, the NIC for the Internet side seemed to be
the suspect part. It showed up to be an Olicom OC2326 Ethernet adapter (using the tlan
driver), which I have been using for years on Novell and MS platforms without any
problems. I have the same card in use for the internal network on that server, and it
runs fine, but with 100Mbit full duplex, though.
I replaced the Olicom card with a very old - almost obsolete - 3Com 3C509, and after
that, anything worked splendidly. The problem seems to be, that I was unable to find
the proper parameters for the tlan driver to force the Olicom NIC into 10Mbit half
duplex mode, and its auto-setup did
not comply very well with my 10Mbit Internet router/hub. But then again, I guess
Olicom was out of business before they managed to release any proper documentation for
using theirs NIC's under Linux.
So much for a 30-years-in-the-business veteran, who thougth he had seen it
all...............
Thanks ever so much to all nice people, especially Pedro Pablo, for their help and
tips. Due to all the spamming on this mailing list I am going to unsubscribe now, so
if anyone has questions or remarks to the above, I will be grateful for direct mailing
to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Regards, Joern.-
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>> "Pedro P Sacristan Sanz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 02-04-02 09:03:49 >>>
Just in case you haven't done: have you checked the duplex mode of your
network adapter in both your firewall and the attached switch?
Maybe you have a duplex mismatch if one of them is in auto-negotiation, and
the other one is forced to a specific speed and duplex mode; generally the
network may still work without great performance degradation, but FTP is
the main clue to detect it, because its performance degrades a lot.
Regards
Pedro Pablo
