From prior posts, the trasfer rates were...

Putting ThinkPad -> Tower: 891.92 KB/s 
Getting Tower -> ThinkPad: 41.11 KB/s

...and repeating the second, but this time as...

ftp> get rsync-2.4.6.tar.gz /dev/null

...resulted in a rate of 48.80 KB/s on the first try, then
23.90 KB/s on the 2nd, 23.57 KB/s on the 3rd. And for a
comparison I did without the /dev/null and got a transfer
rate of 27.48 KB/s.

I note the same rate of light-blinking whether to /dev/null
or to the disk. On doing get to disk, I observe that the
readout for transfer rate starts out high, then ramps down
with each blink of lights to less and less until the final
value is as reported. On doing get to /dev/null I do not
see a read-out, so can't tell what is going on that way.

On Sunday 30 September 2001 19:43, you wrote:
> 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.htm
>l> on both ends and use that to do your network speed testing.