Category: Uncategorized

network wrangling

So the followup to this on networking issues is that I don’t think everyone involved is being honest.

As best I can tell, forcing hosts in full-duplex mode is a non-starter. The switch can be set that way on all ports

Picture 4-1

but the hosts seems to do fine in half-duplex or autoselect, depending on the OS involved, whether it’s OS X

Picture 5
or FreeBSD.

Picture 6
The source for these huge transfers is the first system shown above and the destination is on a wireless link. It would be nice to see better than ~10 Mbits but I don’t know what magic I need for that to work. I’ll just let it go for now.

Graph Image-1.Php-1

what’s happening here?

I have been trying to copy a raft of files (iTunes files that have been massaged on a faster machine). I thought things were going too slowly (the data plotted over the Sat 12:00 legend) so I plugged both machines into the wired network and turned on 100 MBit full-duplex. That is shown over the Sun 12:00 to Monday.

Graph Image.Php

Exasperated, I turned off full-duplex, dropping back to automatic/half-duplex on the source machine and went back to 54 Mbit wireless for the destination. That’s the much more impressive data you see far right. Following it in a terminal window and watching disk usage, it’s working a lot faster.

Doesn’t make any sense to me. I expected 100 Mbit full to outperform the mixed environment.

Continue reading “what’s happening here?”

he’ll get away with it, I expect

Salacious Gossip Watch:

In the much-linked story about Robert Draper’s interviews with President Bush, this passage:

In response to Mr. Draper’s observance that Mr. Bush had nobody’s “shoulder to cry on,” the president said: “Of course I do, I’ve got God’s shoulder to cry on, and I cry a lot.”

Um, Laura? Heck, Condi?

Also, why does anyone believe the President when he says he’s just not sure how the decision to disband the Iraqi Army got made? The passage that follows, about how Bush wished diplomacy “had worked” in Iraq is clearly dishonest. I bet the one about Bush not knowing the details of the disbanding the Iraqi Army is a crock too.

I see a whole of lot classifying and shredding going on before he’ll let himself be found accountable for that mess o’potamia . . . .

to the boneyard, updated

Clearing out a lot of old surplus junk this week, and my local recycler is going to be the beneficiary. I have to pay him, it’s so bad.

  • gateway PC, ca. 1993 (a raging 233 MHz)
  • PowerMac 9500, ca. 1995 (identically fast)
  • 17 inch display
  • 15 inch display
  • assorted keyboards
  • a logic board I picked up and never used
  • some old disk drives and CD drives.

[cost me $36.50 to get rid of this $%^&. Apple branded monitors cost extra to get rid of, apparently, so the 17 inch Studio Display separated me from $15.]

Trying to sell an old G3 iMac on Craigslist, without a lot of optimism, even for a tenth of what it cost 7 years ago. I figured the kids might use it, but they prefer the G5 iMac (not that I blame them) and I like them using it where I can see ’em.

Keeping, for now, an old ThinkPad with a good DVD drive, as a way to play DVDs, if nothing else. I scraped it clean and applied the restore CD today, but I may put Ubuntu on it just to see if that makes better use of it than Win2K.

[Ubuntu won’t install on the ThinkPad, as there is a risk of overwriting the serial eeprom, according to an error displayed, just before the process gives up and hangs.]