Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!ron.rutgers.edu!ron From: ron@ron.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: How would *you* upgrade this network? Keywords: ethernet, FDDI, Proteon, TCP/IP, Bridge, Sun Message-ID: Date: 7 Oct 88 01:46:50 GMT References: <281@fed.FRB.GOV> <123@unet.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 15 > When I > recently got a Sniffer and set it up to look only at broadcast/multicast > packets I was surprised to find out how little bandwidth and packet rate > was attributable to these packet types. Ah, but is that the whole story. Sun had to come up with another policy for rwho on their own inhouse Ethernet for a very interesting reason. What would happen is every three minutes a broadcast rwho packet would go out. This, in itself, is innocuous. Then every diskless client on the net would immediately go page in the rwhod to answer the packet swamping the fileservers. It only takes a few broadcasts to spur some real neat network crashes. You can also try pinging the broadcast address sometime to find out what really is going on on your net. -Ron