[lug] NIC Speed

[Sexton, George]

>> I've since learned that many networking gods think
>> that 3Com cards are junk despite their reputation)

12 years ago, I worked at COBE labs in Arvada. We were using Novell Netware
2.x and I was one of the departmental network administrators.
Intermittently, all of the machines on the LAN would simultaneously lock up
hard. Not only on our LAN, but the LAN in Lakewood, which was connected by a
T1 circuit and a switch.

After a while, we noticed that only machines that had the 3C50X series of
cards would lock. Machines using the (cheaper and faster) Western Digital
cards did not lock up. The problem continued, with the LAN being knocked out
at least once a week, sometimes multiple times a day.

Finally, IT discovered the issue. If you ran the 3COM diagnostic software on
a machine connected to the LAN, it sent out a packet that caused all of the
machines with 3COM cards to lock up.

When I asked 3COM about the wisdom of this, their response was something
like:

"At our company, it is a termination offense to run that software on the
LAN"

I have very rarely bought 3COM since then.



-----Original Message-----
From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]On
Behalf Of Bear Giles
Sent: 01 May, 2002 7:39 PM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: Re: [lug] NIC Speed


If you want to know what your performance is, not what mode your NIC
is in, a lot of people recommend "bing".  It will collect statistics
over a period of time and give you both average and extreme cases.

On my system, I'm seeing around 35 Mbps on the LAN (which isn't
surprising since I've since learned that many networking gods think
that 3Com cards are junk despite their reputation), and probably
something around 800kbps to some well-connected sites via the cable
modem.

Bear
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