I've gotten a number of responses, many indicating they had seen
similar problems. We haven't arrived at a solution yet. We did
try two things:
1. Applied v5.9 firmware - did not help the problem
2. set switch port to autonegotiate, alpha to autonegotiate
(at console - evidently you can't do this with ifconfig?)
- when set at alpha console, system said it was
autonegotiating at 100 full-duplex
- when booting said "auto-negotiation on, will advertise
100 full-duplex"
- when most of the way up said it fell back to 100 half-duplex
- switch went to 100 half-duplex
Currently most NIC/switch ports are hard set to 100/full, and work,
but in a few cases where this didn't work some are set with:
switch: auto - NIC: 100/full
or switch: auto - NIC: auto
and these settings do work. I've run some tests from host-host across
the same switch, fasts speeds I've recorded are about 8.5MB/sec, probably
100 but not full-duplex. This is using standard ftp.
- anyone know what I should expect to see that would tell
me something was actually running at 100/full?
Here are the responses - thanks to all who replied. I believe this
may be an ongoing issue for us.
----------------------------------------------
From: "O'Brien, Pat"
there are 3 versions of the de500 chipset. I do not recall, but they do
behave differently.
--------------------------------------------------------------
From: Kjell Andresen
1. Don't use scp to test, use some program without encryption ie. wget or ftp.
2. On Tru64 v5.1 my last experience is to use autonegotiation -
earlier this was not good, but now it works a lot better than
setting the speeds at the switch and machine.
We use Cisco 2924 and DE600(in the DS20E w. v5.1?) and a lot of DE500s
on the same switch with TU v4.0D and above.
The latter ones are hard set on both sides.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Warren
We have seen all sorts of problems with the 3com switches. The
Alpha cards will run at 100FD, but with the 3coms you may do
better to do 100HD
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Aaron Siebert"
I work with alpaserver 4100s and I am having the same issues.
However my cards are the digital tulip chip ethernet cards with
Cisco switches. I can dynamically change the duplex and speed via
ifconfig interface speed 100/200
and it changes the performance. However, my switches tell me the
same that they are negotiating 100 full duplex however in one
direction I get 100mb and the other is Kb per sec. I have been
fighting this issue for a couple of days. To the best of my
knowledge I believe it is a duplex mismatch. I have not
attempted to set both switch and card manually without autoconfigure.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "John J. Francini"
Here in my environment (Tru64 Release Engineering), we maintain a
sizable private "build-net" that connects all the systems we use to
build Tru64 UNIX with all the servers where the sources live. The
servers and build systems are mainly 4100s with a handful of ES40s.
Most of these machines have DE500 cards.
We've discovered that the DE500s do not get along well with some
10/100 switches in full-duplex 100Mb/sec mode, including
Digital-branded ones. We found we were not getting anything close to
10 MB/sec, similar to your experience This was a couple of years
ago, so the exact details are blurry.
So what did we do? We set all our DE500s and the corresponding
switches to 100Mb/sec half-duplex. We also this year started a
project to replace the DE500s with DE600s. The DE600s use a
different Ethernet chip, one that seems to get along just fine with a
broader range of switches.
We've been able to use 100Mb/sec full-duplex and autonegotiate
settings with the DE600s, and we find we are definitely getting full
throughput on these links.
So my suggestions are as follows:
1. The no-cost approach: Try 100Mb/sec half-duplex on both the DE500
cards and on the switch port. Don't use autonegotiation -- hard-set
both ends of the connection. Yes, it lowers potential throughput if
data is moving in both directions simultaneously, but it should still
be better than what you're seeing.
2. The other approach: remove the DE500s and replace them with
DE600s. Note that if you do so with Tru64 4.0F, you'll need to
install the NHD3 kit that adds support for the cards, or upgrade to
5.0A or newer. (This is because the DE600s require a different
driver, which is not included in 4.0F. It MAY be included in 4.0G,
but I'm not sure.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Scott Fafrak"
I recently had a similar problem with my XP900 and DS10. I bought an 8-port
Netgear switch and unless I set my systems to auto-negotiate, they will
only connect at 100mb/half-dup. If I set fastfd, I get half-dup. If I set
auto-neg, I get full-dup.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Hahling, Werner"
Just went down the same path - install the latest SRM/ARC (from Firmware CD
5.9)which fixes the problems ...
... had the same with a AS1000A ...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Ian Mortimer
We have one of those (3Com 3300) and have had no problems with
alphas (and other hardware) set to auto negotiate and the switch
set to auto negotiate. Transfer speeds are what you would expect
- not 100Mbps but about 20 times what we got with the alphas
set to 10Mbps HD). The newest alphas all report 100Mbps full duplex
and so does the corresponding switch port. Older alphas show
10Mbps half duplex.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Lyndon Handy"
Very very common problem. This issue with 3Com devices and AlphaServers has
been around for many years!
We have virtually identical situation as to yours!
AlphaServer 4100's, GS140, GS60, ES40, 2100's, etc with 10/100 NIC's
connected to 3Com 3900's, and 3300's rolled up to a 9300 backbone. In EVERY
case we set the respective AlphaServer's 3Com port to *no* autonegotiate,
and set the ewaxxx or equivalent console variable to fastfd.
Then immediately do a 'ping test' with a large 4K or greater packet size and
look at the latency (should be 0 latency if working properly).
Warning: Don't be fooled. If the setup is not working properly, the
network will still come up but throughput will be horrible (a few
Kbytes/sec!). Try an FTP transfer just to be certain.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joe Fletcher
I'm afraid I can't suggest a fix. I can only say that on a similar rig I
use I get 8-9MB/s between an ES40 and a bunch of PCs (mostly Deskpros with
a few DELLs) and also the various Alphastations on the network. I've got
a DEGPA into the 3300 switch stack plus a 10/100 (one of the combined
ethernet/SCSI controllers). Even when just using the 100Base card I will
still see 7-8MB/s between server and clients.
You might want to check that server and client are on the same switch and
if not then look at the switch interconnect. The stack I've got uses the
usual superstack matrix interconnect.
Received on Wed Apr 04 2001 - 14:28:50 NZST