On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Gan Uesli Starling wrote:
> 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.

Well, it's an okay card :) It's PCMCIA, which is a 16-bit interface, and
not terribly fast these days--you're not going to get anywhere near
100Mbps with it. However, you should be able to get 10Mbps just fine,
and you're not even getting that, so there's a bottleneck somewhere.
The PCMPC200 is a 32-bit Cardbus card, and can get better transfer
rates...

> 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.

You might try ftping from the Thinkpad to the tower and doing a
get filename /dev/null

which will transfer the file over, but not actually write it to the
disk. Or install ttcp
<ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/benchmarks/ttcp/README.html>
on both ends and use that to do your network speed testing.