Subject: Still having speed problems with Netatalk

From: Jesse Smillie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 23:36:37 -0400

I sent in about a week or so ago about this problem and never got an
answer.  In the mean time I tried some slightly different options.  My
whole problem to begin with was that I got the netatalk setup properly
to my knowledge because I am able to see the server, login into it VIA
the chooser, and munipulate files.  The problem is that transfer of
files just isn't fast enough.  The old machines stats aren't important
now I don't think because what I end up rapping that off to was maybe
the PCI bus in the older machine just couldn't handle the network cards
at their full speed (100Mbs.)  I got my hands on another machine which
used to be our proxy server until about two months ago and tried using
it.  Basically it boots off of an IDE Maxtor 12gig drive and all the
files I'm trying to serve are on a 2Gig Quantum SCSI which is set up for
20Mbs per second.  I set the serve up with a custom kernal and also the
100Mbs network card that came with the server (digitial something.)  In
the end it was faster then the original server that I built last week,
however just not fast enough yet.  I tried swapping around network cards
and putting a 3com 905b-TX but it didn't help the problem.  I also
attempted to put 2 3com 905bs in and try to setup some kind of double
route possibley, but I wasn't successful with that because it kept
coming up that it couldn't create the workstation.  In attempting to
actually fill in info in the atalkd.conf file all I ever come up with
was that Net wasn't a proper number.  Right now I'm only getting 10kbs
from the server, which isn't very good considering on my other box in
the high school (ya I work for a school district) I can get about 1Mbs
DLs and uploads through out the building over FTP.  I even went one more
step further in trying out different options as to try and put some of
the database I'm trying to serve (perticularly the part with the
greatest demand) onto a ramdisk using 64megs of PC66 DIMM.  I have
another 128Megs of ram in for the server BTW so I can't see it coming
down to a low mem issue.

Just some quick Stats here:
The server is a PII 233 Mmx with 196Megs of Pc66 DIMMs, 64 Megs
dedicated to a ram disk where I'm holding some of the database files.
The server is running slackware 7.1

The Macs I'm serving to are all Imac DVs with 128Megs of ram, 10gig
drives, OS 9.1 running with of course like all Imacs on board NICs using
apple drivers.

Like I said middle of the way through I work for Gateway School District
in Monroeville PA and what I'm tring to do is serve up a database for
the mac program Reading Counts.  Prior to this attempt it was ran off of
a Netware 5.1 server using prosoft engineerings netware clien which
recently died in which I'd really like to see a linux machine doing this
job!  I seriously don't beleive that a netware server (even using its
native mode) can do anything better then a linux box.  Common someone
help me prove this theory:>

Hopefully I gave enough info, and I'm sorry if I may have over did it.
-Jesse Smillie
[email-masked]