Okay, memory returns, to small avail. Never mind
about the MTU thing. What I was advised to do 
previously, in order to avoid smashed packets,
was this on the Tower box...

# ifconfig fxp0 mediaopt half-duplex

...but that made it even slower. Way slower yet. I can't
seem to do anything on the ThinkPad, because its media is
reported as "manual" by ifconfig.

My ThinkPad's NIC is a Linksys PCMPC100, which the ads say
is a very fine card. And its twin brother works just fine on
the Win98 laptop.

I have been studying the lights on my multiport switch. There
are green lights for 100MB/s. Both of those are always on. And
there are lights for FDX vs Collision. Those always stay green
for FDX, I never see them blink yellow for collision.

The main discrepancy I not is the blink-rate of the green lights
for 100MB/s. On the fast transfer they are solid green. On the
slow transfer they blink off and on, with 1 or 2-second gaps in
the off mode.

So I am thinking, that maybe every thing is okay with the LAN but
that the ThinkPad is just really slow at servicing the LAN when
it has to write stuff to the disk. Because on upload it is fast.
On download it is slow, with all lights green, but blinking slowly.

Is that a reasonable hypothesis?

Thanks,

Gan

On Sunday 30 September 2001 16:27, you wrote:
> Getting back to a problem from before my other, bigger
> problem (which prevented my documenting this problem)...
>
> I'm not even sure it really is a problem. I just want to
> be sure that it is not related to my mgetty delay problem
> noted in another thread. I just observe a big, big speed
> difference between the ThinkPad and the Tower.
>
> We kinda went over this before. Then, however, ftp would
> flat stall and die. Now it never stalls, thanks to the
> "mtu 1500" arg suggested previously. I just want to know
> if the speed asymetry is something to worry about.
>
> Putting ThinkPad -> Tower: 891.92 KB/s
> Getting Tower -> ThinkPad: 41.11 KB/s
>
> Now, the ThinkPad is 266MHz PII, and the Tower is 800MHz Celeron.
>
> The LAN connection has been upgraded from X-Over cable to a
> Netgear Fast Ethernet Switch. I have commercial, pre-terminated
> cables.
>
> The Tower reports of its LAN card thus...
>
> gus# ifconfig fxp0
> fxp0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
>         address: 00:03:47:a0:49:27
>         media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex)
>         status: active
>         inet 192.168.1.11 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
>         inet6 fe80::203:47ff:fea0:4927%fxp0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
> gus#
>
> The ThinkPad reports of its LAN card thus...
>
> thinkpad# ifconfig ne2
> ne2: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
>         address: 00:04:5a:92:6e:ae
>         media: Ethernet manual
>         inet 192.168.1.7 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
>         inet6 fe80::204:5aff:fe92:6eae%ne2 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x12
> thinkpad#
>
> And this is how FTP works from the ThinkPad to the Tower -- put & get...
>
> thinkpad# ftp
> ftp> open gus.starling.ws
> Connected to gus.starling.ws.
> 220-
> 220 gus.starling.ws FTP server (NetBSD-ftpd 20010329) ready.
> Name (gus.starling.ws:root): aplonis
> 331 Password required for aplonis.
> Password:
> 230-
>     NetBSD 1.5.1 (GENERIC) #56: Mon Jul  2 15:54:23 CEST 2001
>
>     Welcome to NetBSD!
>
> 230 User aplonis logged in.
> Remote system type is UNIX.
> Using binary mode to transfer files.
> ftp> put rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz
> local: rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz remote: rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz
> 229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||65517|)
> 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 'rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz'.
> 100% |*************************************|   324 KB  891.92 KB/s    00:00
> ETA
> 226 Transfer complete.
> 332253 bytes sent in 00:00 (883.84 KB/s)
> ftp> get rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz
> local: rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz remote: rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz
> 229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||65516|)
> 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 'rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz' (332253
> bytes).100% |*************************************|   324 KB   41.11 KB/s
> 00:00 ETA
> 226 Transfer complete.
> 332253 bytes received in 00:07 (41.09 KB/s)
> ftp> quit
> 221-
>     Data traffic for this session was 664506 bytes in 2 files.
>     Total traffic for this session was 665422 bytes in 2 transfers.
> 221 Thank you for using the FTP service on gus.starling.ws.
> thinkpad#
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gan