Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!hao!gatech!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Latest news on our ether errors Message-ID: <8403@g.ms.uky.edu> Date: 20 Feb 88 08:09:03 GMT Organization: U of Ky, Math. Sciences, Lexington KY Lines: 40 Well, a little bit of sleuthing uncovered the fact that we were having a broadcast storm, and didn't even know it. I guess you wouldn't call it anything worse than a light rainshower -- but anyway, it was there. If you remember our configuration, we do have 4.3 hosts along with hosts which have 4.2 derived software. Well, turning on tcpdump and looking for arp gave me an eyeful -- a constant stream of 3b2s/3b1s and a sequent all arping for 128.163.255.255. Do you know how boring it is to add almost the same line to 20-30 /etc/rc files? Anyway, I told 'em all to use .0.0 as the broadcast address and rebooted 'em all. That, at least, cleared up the broadcast storm. However we are still seeing ether errors, but not nearly as badly as before. Something I noticed today is that our most error-full machine is also the one that serves most of the home directories for the people with workstations. Strange coincidence there. Fortunately we have some more uVaxen arriving to use as servers... so this load'll be spread out some. um, one last thing. I mention this in order to find out the truth of the matter and I certainly don't want to make anybody mad ... but in an earlier posting I related a memory from a DEC salesman that Sun ethernet equipment had some sort of problem ... We now have better word on what this problem is. The claim is that Sun ethernet drivers will shove packets out with too small of a time-gap between them. Specifically 1 micro-second, and that the 802.3 spec wants a 10 microsecond gap. How true is this? I vaguely recall reading something along those lines recently -- it seems it was a Sun person being proud that their hardware is able to keep up a sustained rate on input AND output at the max speed allowed by the spec. -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- or: {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- <---- It takes more than a good memory to have good memories.