Terrible Ethernet performance
 

Ok, I hope this is an easy one for somebody. I am dying over this problem.

I have recently setup a new Samba server 2.2.6
using SuSE 8.0 (2.4 kernel). It is a new machine Athlon XP 2000+ Raid disk and 512 Meg DDR memory. I am setting this up only for fileserving for 5 people. The machine should be way more than needed so the following problem is killing me.


The Linux machine is running horrible over the network. I have 1% CPU utilization and almost no traffic is coming/going out ot the interface. I have tried an onboard Realtek ethernet and also an add-on netgear card with the same problem.

ifconfig eth0 show no errors just a very slow increase in the RX/TX numbers. It is running 100M full-duplex into a netgear router. Other machines on this network can talk to each other with no problems.

Logging onto this machine from any other machine takes many minutes and fails most of the time.


I am rather new to Linux, but I have stripped this distro down quite a bit, so not much should be in the way.


Any suggestions? I may have to abandon Linux as my files server and go over to the dark side - I really do not want this!!.

Thanks in advance!


Pat

When using the machine for other tasks.... do you see any network problems? Or is it only when accessing via Samba clients?

-K.

Originally I figured it was Samba, tried all kind of things.


Than I woke up and stepped back. It appears that I am having network problems in general. sendmail crawls when sending mail. The TX packet count just slowly increases.

The web browser is not bad, but I have not done a lot of verifying yet. I need to get some FTP benchmarks.

I have installed this distro on another machine (much older) and using the same configs it works great.


I have replaced the ethernet cable, plugged into different switch ports with no luck.

Pat

A few things to look at:

1) Is name resolution working on the linux box? Many services on the box will reverse-lookup the IP address of incoming connections, and will seem to stall for a while if DNS isn't configured properly on the box (valid /etc/resolv.conf will fix this).

2) Check some other protocols. From the same client windows machine, try downloading a large file from your linux server using a http or ftp protocols. Is it as slow? (note that if you use Internet Explorer to check ftp, it's always slow starting up the ftp connection initially, best to use commandline ftp).

3) If your linux machine is dual-bootable to windoze, if you boot to windows and offer an SMB network share from the same machine just under a different OS, does the problem remain?

4) If not, can you plug a windows machine in where the linux box is supposed to be, give it the linux box's settings (ip address, etc), and share out a filesystem? Is it any worse or better?

I have verified that IP looks good. I can FTP between machines and everything screams.


I have moved this Samba machine to a standalone test network with 1 XP machine. It rocks, the XP client logs on and has its profile pushed down in seconds.

The production network is a group of Win XP/98 workgroup machines doing PTP over Netbeui. I am trying to migrate them to Samba.

Even when I shutdown these machines and use only the new XP machines running only Netbios over IP I still crawl.

I am wondering if I have a Netbios issue? The Samba machine shows up as the DMB.

Any suggestions?

Try looking in your smb.conf file for these settings:

[global]
local master = ?
preferred master = ?
domain master = ?


set them all to "no". You could be having "Browser Wars" with constant Master Browser elections going on. May or may not be related to Samba. Set all those to "no" and then stop and start smbd and see if that makes a difference.

-K.

Is your NIC running at 100 Full Duplex?

Below is the command to force your Nic to full 100 duplex
mii-tool -F 100baseTx-FD

Check your physical connections too. Losing frames 100% is because there's an interface down. Losing 50% of frames is a funny physical connection usually.

I have verified I am running 100Mbs full-duplex.

Just for "fun" I went over to the http://www.scyld.com/ network driver site and grabbed the newest driver modules "rtl8139.c" and compiled/installed it. I still have the same issue. SuSE installed 8139too as its driver module, but either one work the same for me.

I show no lost packets, I even ran new CAT5 wire to to make sure. Everything from the IP side looks good, I can push a lot of data using PING with large packet sizes or FTP large files with no lost frames.

Definately driving me nuts.

Pat

Thanks for the updates,

I tried setting:

local master = No
preferred master = No
domain master = No

And still have the same problem. I am totally out of ideas on this one.

Any thoughts from anyone?

Pat

Well I'm no help for you pat, but I have a probably similar problem:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=36587

Can you check your web browser with a few sites and see if you have the slowdown problem there as well? Check out the sites mentioned in my post.

Btw. ph317 and others:
My /etc/resolv.conf points to my router which forwards the request, but I've also tried with my ISPs DNS. No difference.

Cheers,
Andre

I have pushed the latest microcode to the Netgear router to no avail.

I disabled file/print sharing onththe XP client with no luck.

Turned on UPNP (What the heck had nothing to lose) ... nope


performace is still terrible - unusable actually.

I added the server to the hosts and lmhost file on the XP client .. no good.

The only thing I can think of left is to swap out the router. Anyone heard of a router causing Netbios over IP problems? IP appears to worlk fine.


Anyone have any thoughts ... I'm dying.

Pat

It still may be a problem with NetBIOS browser elections between your client machines. Try turning one client off at a time and see if the network problems clear up.

Let us know.

-K.

I placed the Samba server and one XP client onto a separate router/switch by itself. I still have the same problems -- really makes no sense what I am seeing. Both running 100Mbs full-duplex.

I now have no idea what is going on as I cannot get a common pattern to show up now.

I have previously placed the server onto another test LAN and the XP clients work great. I have replaced hardware to no avail.


I plan to re-image one of the XP Clients that do not work now and try it. If it works I will then add XP SP1 to it and see if it still occurs.


Like I said, I can't figure out what is going on and am out of ideas.

Anyone have a suggestion of what to try next?

Pat

Placing the Samba server and one of the clients on a separate network just proves there is nothing wrong with the server or that client. It does NOTHING to show you if other clients are having browser election wars. I have seen it many times before in the NT world where that can bring your network performance to a standstill.

Its basic troubleshooting and common sense. You have elminated the server and that one client, now you need to start looking at the other components of your network and the other clients.


-K.