tlug: Re: tlug-digest V1 #1282

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Tony" == Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com> writes:

    >> They work.  As with all ne2000 clones, they're also complete
    >> pieces of crap.

    Tony> Wonder why you call them crap - will it have a short life or
    Tony> not perform well?

They're broken by design.  Like Winmodems.  Basically, you're
restricted to getting ISA performance on a PCI bus.  Which is probably 
plenty on a one user OA workstation or a home net server.  Chris just
believes hardware should "be all it can be".

For a couple thousand yen more, it ought to be possible to get
ethernet cards that let your CPU compute instead of nannying the
network.

    Tony> 1) does irqtune really improve performance very much? 

YMMV.

    Tony> I have these two computers pulling on the Internet through a
    Tony> 28.8 ppp connection; noticeably slow when one of the
    Tony> computers is downloading a file or using realaudio.

irqtune is probably irrelevant there; you want some kind of load
balancing, but after that I dunno.  It would have to be a kernel
modification to the TCP/IP stack, maybe IP accounting?  The eql.o
module sounds plausible, but actually that's for turning two or more
serial lines into a single P2P link, not balancing two or more
connections on a single line.  (Learn something new every day, I do.)

Of course, that will seriously impact your realaudio performance.

    Tony> Is it worth replacing the modutils and will such a move
    Tony> screw up something else if I'm not lucky?

Yes and yes.  You'll have to be rather unlucky though.  This is one
instance where I definitely do not recommend using another
distribution's RPMs, though; stick to TL's.

    Tony> 3) any online documents that will help me get the mac user
    Tony> set up to send/receive email through ip masquerading? I
    Tony> haven't seen much on this in the ip masquerade - related
    Tony> materials. Perhaps it's so easy it doesn't merit
    Tony> documentation (I hope)?

Probably easy.  Outgoing should be trivial because SMTP uses one
two-way channel (unlike say FTP) so protocol responses will
automatically come back to the originating port, as masqueraded.  I
think the same is true of POP3, but I don't have that RFC on hand.

Can't hurt to try ;-)

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
What are those two straight lines for?  "Free software rules."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Nomikai: September 17 (Fri), 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
*** Linux 8th Birthday Anniversary! ***
Next Technical Meeting: October 9 (Sat), 13:00     place: Temple Univ.
*** Topics: 1) Linux i18n   2) Japanese TrueType fonts
-------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan