On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 04:30:24PM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> On 09 Dec 2004 21:59:29 +0100, Christian Groessler <cpg@aladdin.de> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > > From: Andy Ruhl [mailto:acruhl@gmail.com]
> > >
> > > Note that if you have a buggy network or network adapter, all bets are
> > > off if you are swapping. With 16 megs of memory on the dreamcast, it's
> > > probably very likely you are swapping. And I'm not sure you'd ever
> > > know if the network was giving you problems unless you want to go
> > > through a dump to find out...
> > 
> > Hmm, what do you mean with the network "giving problems"? I've tried
> > with 2 different network adapters and it happens with both. So the
> > adapters themselves shouldn't be the problem.
> 
> Yeah well...
> 
> This is sort of a problem because the network adapter we all know
> isn't the greatest chipset ever (that realtek stuff is not top of the
> line), and since if you get an error on that adapter it can't log it
> since it needs to use the network to log the error... You get the
> picture. You tried 2 different dreamcast adapters? If so, that's
> pretty lucky that you have that many of them...

I just logged in to my dreamcast and started the following:

  $ ssh host 'cat /dev/zero' > /dev/null

According to ntop, the speed of this transfer is around 3-4 MBps
(which is probably mostly limited by the SSH en-/decryption).
I can't check constantly if the Dreamcast is still up, but I'll
have a look tonight.  If it's still up, this is a first
indication that it's not a networking issue, but something else.

So far my Dreamcast has an uptime of 25 days, so it's pretty
stable as long as it's idle.  I guess one can therefore pretty
safely blame one of the parts involved in the above test if it
crashes by tonight.

Next I'll then try the same test as above, just with _outgoing_
transfers, and then I'll give NFS a try.

All of this is with the LAN Adapter, I don't have a BBA.


bye,
  Harold