*BSD News Article 91095


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From: Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FTP problem
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 12:01:56 +1000
Organization: On the Net (ISP on the Gold Coast, Australia)
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Ken wrote:
> 
> Problem of the day for this newbie:
> FTP transfers from client to FreeBSD 2.1.5 server usually fail or are so
> slow that
 
> This is a single client communicating with the FreeBSD server via
> 10baseT.

Given that this is an Ethernet connection, you have a SERIOUSLY BROKEN
network.
I would suspect a bad NIC in one of the machines or an IRQ conflict or
such that is causing transmission problems!

> Permissions for the server's target directory are set to rwx for the
> owner,
> who is the user doing the FTP transfers.

Directory permissions are not the cause of your problem...

> 
> Transfers from the server to the client are as fast as expected.

This would tend to indicate that the problem is in the server NIC, not
the client.
I have seen problems where the cards have vastly different capabilities
in speed
and data transfer (eg. PCI card in one machine, crappy old ISA card in
the other).
The fast card can totally swamp the slower card causing the TCP protocol
major
headaches.  When going in the other direction, the problem does not
occur because
the small ACKs coming back don't overflow the internal card FIFOs, etc.

The cards I have had problem with are SVEC NE2000 clones talking to PCI
2104x NICs.
I have also been told that the SVEC cards don't handle IRQs above 7 so
in one system
that I was having problems with I dropped the IRQ down to < 7 and it
works a hell of
a lot better!

> 
> Will anyone give me guidance in what is being done incorrectly here?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Ken Welch
> welk@mem.net

Tony