Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!BNR.CA!BSCHMIDT From: BSCHMIDT@BNR.CA (Ben Schmidt, B.T.) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk Subject: re:GatorBox killing our SCO UNIX machines Message-ID: Date: 30 May 90 17:31:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 23 Brian H. Powell, National Instruments writes: > We got a GatorBox Friday... > We plugged it in, turned it on, configured everything just so, > downloaded the software. Poof, every one of our SCO UNIX '386 > machines on ethernet died. (They just froze until a hard reboot.) > Several people with other sorts of machines (e.g., PC/NFS) > complained of an intolerably slow network for several seconds. > Even someone with an rs232 connection to a Sun workstation > complained that the machine was suddenly intolerably slow. Perhaps > because that Sun was a YP server, and a network gateway. I can't explain what's going on, but then again, a lot of things happen on my own network, which I can't explain. Anyhow, I wanted to add that when we first looked at PC/NFS, its default was to use the old-style all zero broadcast address. That means it wouldn't work here, as its broadcasts would be ignored by the rest of our IP nodes. As well, it also means, that it could ARP for the host portion of the broadcast address, which could smoke out other non-compliant IP implementations on the network, not to mention create a lot of unnecessary broadcast traffic. Mind you, since presumably your PC/NFS has been working to date, maybe all your IP nodes (except the GatorBox?) agreed to use all zero's as a broadcast address? :^) regards, ben, Information Technology/BNR