Re: [WinMac] Mac with Linux

Bruce Johnson(johnson[at]Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU)
Fri, 12 Mar 1999 08:05:02 -0700

Chuck Hogye wrote:
>
> Hi. I work at an Apple VAR and we have a customer who complains that when
> their single Power Mac G3 is attached to their 10BT Ethernet WinNT network,
> they see the network come to a crawl and witness many dropped packets.
> Configuration (as described to me):
> Win NT server
> internal and external nets with a Linux server used as a router between
> The G3 is attached to the internal 10BT net.
> Do you think Linux is not passing AppleTalk packets correctly? If they
> disable AppleTalk, the packet dropping problem seems to disappear, but not
> the slowness of the network. Any ideas?
>

Well, if they disable AppleTalk, then that eliminates just about anything
specific to the Mac OS that could be doing to cause this. Is this on a
previously unused port/network segment/etc?

This sounds almost like an Ethernet problem, and I've seen this kind of thing
before, where adding a new node on the network makes _everything_ clog up,
removing the node fixes things, so it must be the node, right? Wrong. This
sort of thing is what drives the network people here at the University batty,
because the problem could be something slightly misconfigured _anywhere_ on
the internal 10bt network, at least the segment that the Mac is on. You don't
mention if it's a switched network or not.

 Have they looked to see if their collision rate is up (which would account
for the network slowness). That would imply ethernet problems. If a PC node on
that port causes the same probvlems, then they need to examine their network.

It _could_ be a bad ethernet adapter on the Mac, too.

OOh I just remembered...if the Linux box _is_ routing AppleTalk, then ALL
Appletalk devices on it's subnet need to be OFF when it is turned on, so it
can become the AppleTalk seed router...otherwise you have things like printers
trying to do that...that's another headache for our network control people

I'd put in a packet sniffer and start figuring out just what is going on.

* Windows-MacOS Cooperation List *

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Mar 12 1999 - 07:07:42 PST