[techtalk] Poor performance on home LAN

[Nathan T. Lynch]

> According to the ifconfig source, it's frame alignment error.  I think
> frame alignment error usually means that it gets a packet/frame that is
> not properly aligned, IE not a multiple of 8 bits.  That definitely
> shouldn't be happening that often.

Hmm.  Maybe there's some sort of trouble with my firewall's network
cards (cheap ISA ne2000 clones).

> ...my intuition would be that a faulty PCI bus would
> produce more in the "errors" field, because of corrupted packets.
> ....
> That pretty much leaves
> the OS (what v. of the kernel?  It's probably not the driver, if the
> exact same thing has been happening with 3 different cards) or the
> hardware (you aren't overclocking, are you? does the card share an
> interrupt?)...

Ack, can't believe I didn't mention what I'm running on the desktop:
I've tried Red Hat 6.0 and 6.1, Slackware 7.0, and FreeBSD 3.4.  All had
the same troubles.  (Does FreeBSD use the same driver code as Linux?) 
I've installed kernel 2.2.14 on each of the Linux distributions, again,
no dice.  I also grabbed the newest (stable?) version of the tulip
driver (0.93 I think; RH ships with something that's over a year old),
but to no avail.

> Well, that probably wasn't much help.  You should probably talk to
> someone who knows more about ethernet (linux-networking mailing list may
> be a good place to ask if noone here can help) :)

Well, even though my problem is not yet solved, I learned a little, and
gained a little reassurance that I don't need to call Tyan yet.

BTW, I asked here because I haven't had much luck with this in
comp.os.linux.networking (no offense to those that tried to help me
there). ;)

Thanks,
Nathan

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