here's a weird one, for anybody using Ethernet and netbsd-amiga.


almathera's office LAN is based around 2 NetBSD/Amiga-loaded A3ks,
one a tower with 2 CBM a2065 ethercards running 1.1 [grapefruit] for
nameserving and routing, the other a normal box with 1.0 as the main
web/fileserv [pineapple].  [for more info on our setup, mail me
direct to save bandwidth] - they serve a mixed cluster of Win95 and
NT PCs, and Amigas running AmiTCP4.x.  any other commercial
developers using netbsd-amiga out there, btw?


the LAN started screwing up big-time when the 2 servers couldn't even
ping each other, but all other machines on the net could see both
machines [to access the fileserv, the nameserv had to be called], and
one of the W95 boxes couldn't see either server but had no problem
pinging the rest of the hosts.  strange-days-R-us.


long story short:  if you're mixing boxes, the ethernet quality
tolerance of netbsd-amiga and win95 is lower than that of
amitcp-amiga or winNT.  weird, but true.


[proved by making and breaking hunks of the net until.  nothing
showed up as bad during stress-testing of single strands with ftp
blasts of 600M ISO images, which made me first think it was something
screwed in the BSD configurations [i moved nameserving from pineapple
to grapefruit when i had 1.1 to play with - the tower-LANhub seems a
good choice - so perhaps there was still some crap left in
pineapple's resolving and routing setup.  no...]


it's good in that you can spot crap quality ethernet segments early
on, bad if you've run out of segments and still need a reliable LAN.
i'll add that the le0 diagnostics for netbsd-amiga 1.1 that come up
on the console ["crc error, frame error"] are far better than their
1.0 counterparts.  and the multi-ether-interface support under 1.1
works like a *dream*.  re-rolled one kernel from GENERIC and the a3kT
hubs fine.  [btw, anyone want some more input for the networking
docs?  it's about time i contributed to netbsd-amiga, we've relied on
it for all development for the last year already ;-]


time to go buy more LAN cable.  [cd-jukebox wrestling next time, folks]


thp/c!truS'96  mail://thp@cix.compulink.co.uk / thp@mono.org
              htthp://thp@work.almathera.uk.tech.netsurf.opticalmastering