Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!arktouros!dyer
From: dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU (Steve Dyer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: Re: a/ux 1.0.1 (actually, ethernet interfaces)
Message-ID: <7325@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 5 Oct 88 18:26:57 GMT
References: <18183@apple.Apple.COM> <1981@spdcc.COM> <18289@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU (Steve Dyer)
Organization: MIT Project Athena, Cambridge MA 02139
Lines: 44

In article <18289@apple.Apple.COM> phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) writes:
>What is going on? Well, there is no bad Ethernet card situation or anything
>like that. And I don't know enough about protocols to say if the postings
>show "we is doing it wrong" or what. BUT WE ARE AWARE OF IT AND AIN'T
>IGNORING IT.

I would guess that you don't know enough about the situation to say that
there is no bad Ethernet card situation.  The symptoms seem to relate
to more than one packet arriving at the interface within a short period of
time--it's not a protocol problem, though it may be a device driver problem
or limitation.  I wouldn't dismiss hardware, however.  I've seen this happen
under A/UX with (presumptive) broadcasts but also with a simple
"rcp -r remote:dir dir"--the network dies every time.

I'd try to change the MTU of the ae0 interface to something smaller than
1500 to see if that had any effect when using TCP, but I haven't found the
appropriate ifnet structure in the kernel yet.

I am always puzzled by responses like that above (and it's not unique to
Apple), because it essentially says "the problem report is written down",
which is gratifying, but strangely unsatisfactory to anyone who also works
in software (especially someone who works with 4.3 networking regularly.)
If I were at Apple, I'd grab the person who wrote the ae interface driver
by the collar and say: "what gives?"  Usually an first-degree explanation of
the problem is obvious, although a solution may not be.  Of course, it may be
that the person who wrote this isn't at Apple, which makes things tougher.

>Looking at my saved postings file, the last time we have a "bunch" of
>I have an Ethernet problem was quite a time ago. It seemed that 4-5 people
>plugged their Ethernet card into A/UX and expected it to right without
>running autoconfig and setting the daemons on /etc/inittab. So there
>was a bunch of "A/UX Ethernet doesn't work" postings. The instructions in
>the release manual explicitly showed how to run autoconfig and enable the
>daemons -- but hey, we're Macintosh users, we don't read no stinkin' manuals...

That is not the case here in any of the recent postings.  I would like to
know, of those of you who are running A/UX on a heterogeneous ethernet,
if there are any of you who are operating WITHOUT this problem.  That
would be a useful datapoint.

---
Steve Dyer
dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU
dyer@spdcc.COM aka {harvard,husc6,ima,bbn,m2c,mipseast}!spdcc!dyer