[OLUG] Collisions?

[Daniel Pfile]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2000 brian at cbiowa.com wrote:

> 	My network has all 100 Meg cards with a 10 Meg hub.  I got a realy good
> deal on a 24 port hub and so I am too cheap to go out an buy a 4 port
> 100 Meg hub to get the full capability of my network.  So far I haven't
> found the need.  I was just looking at trying to make an alright setup
> better.  From what you are saying, what I have is as good as I am going
> to make it?

A 24 port 10bt hub goes for as low as $130 for a cheap one, to $180 for a
3com. An 8 port 100bt starts at around $70, with a 10/100 going for $80. A
3com 100bt only goes for $110. All prices are from pricewatch. Since
you've got 100bt cards in all your computers I'd sugest offloading your 24
port locally or on ebay and picking up the 8 port 100bt 3com. That should
provide with with plenty of expansion and speed.

I recently set up a fileserver with 100bt and compared it to the
fileserver that had 10bt. Using netatalk on both to a G4, the 100bt system
was ALOT faster. The difference was amazing. Going to 100bt is well worth
it. Especially considering if you sold you only have 3 computers and a
10bt 24 port hub, you can profit by getting an 8 port 100bt hub.

As for the reason you only saw 6mbit is because of the overhead of the
protocals.

1) Ethernet packets themselves have overhead, checksums, hardware
   adresses, etc
2) TCP has overhead, IPs, it's own checksums, etc
3) FTP has overhead, not sure what, but I'm sure there's something
4) packets get droped, no nic/hub/etc is 100% things get lost, that's why
   there's all thos checksums.

There's other stuff, but that's just an extremly high overview of why you
only see 6mbit. Other things come into play too, like packet size. If you
trasmit 3k packets, you have less header overhead, but you have to
retransmit all 3k for a failed packet. with 1k packets you'd have more
overhead, but only 1k to retransmit if something went wrong. Stuff does go
wrong, nothing any of us can do about it.

Anyway, get a 100bt hub, you'll like it.


# Daniel Pfile        # I have no cool signature.
# pfiled at marietta.edu # Finger for free illegal software.


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