On 30 Nov 99, at 10:15, Dave Anselmi wrote:

> Hello. I'm posting here as a last resort... I [& my MCSE friend]
> are completely stumped.
>
> I have a 3 computer LAN at home, running win95, 98, & NT. I keep
> getting BSOD's on one of the machines when it's running 95. It
> typically happens during file transfers, especially with 10+ Mbytes
> or more. I've tried this w/ multiple methods: the 95 machine as the
> initiator seems most stable, vs. if the 98 machine initiates the
> transfer. I've also tried with directly-mapped drives, vs. surfing
> thru network neighborhood. No dice, still crashing.
>
> This doesn't happen when that box is running NT, but I need that
> machine to run 95, b/c NT won't run the apps I need. I haven't
> tried that particular M/B / processor w/ 98, b/c I've found 98
> creates massive amounts of collisions during file-transfers, where
> 95 & NT do not [my hub has lights for collisions]. Also 98 is a
> resource dog, and that machine is only a p233.

  There's no obvious reason why different OSes would produce
different collision rates.  This might indicate a driver problem.
  Note that collisions occur on the shared media of the network, not
on a specific machine.  If your hub claims to provide separate
collision indicators for each port, that's probably not really what
it's doing.

> Here's the kicker-- when I re-set the NIC on that [crashing] 95
> machine, knocking it down from 100Mb/s to 10Mb/s, it crashes much
> less often. However, this is the second NIC w/ this behavior;
> currently I've got a 3com 905B, and I used to have an Intel
> EtherexpressPro 100+ (which seemed to crash even more often).
>
> Also, that machine is perfectly stable w/ 95 when it's NOT on the
> network, so this seems to be network related. I'm running TCP/IP
> network, w/ subnet 255.0.0.0 and gateway 9.9.9.9.

  This ought to work, unless you want to connect this network to the
rest of the world someday.  The registered owners of the 9.x.x.x
network will not be happy, and you'll wonder why you can't connect to
anything....  [The 10.x.x.x network is one of three address blocks
reserved by RFC 1918 for private networks, although using a Class A
network address for 3 machines seems like overkill.

> Hardware:
>
> Machine1: [crashes w/ win95]        ip 9.9.9.2
> win95
> asus txp4 [bought new, 1yr ago]
> pentium 233MHz
> 3C905B Etherlink XL at 100Mbit [but now set to 10Mbit]
> Hercules Dynamite ET4000 2mb pci
> AHA-2940U pci
> WDC 10gig & 5 gig ide
> Maxtor 6gig
> creative sb16 isa

  Any sharing of IRQs going on?

> Machine2: [lots of collisions]        ip 9.9.9.1
> win98
> abit bx6 rev2.02 [bought new, 1/2 yr ago]
> celeron 300A at 300MHz or 464MHz
> 3C905B Etherlink XL at 100Mbit
> Creative Exxtreme 4mb Permidia 2 pci
> Dynamite Monster 3DII [voodoo2] 12mb pci
> Promise Fasttrak ide raid pci
> AHA-2940UW pci
> WDC Expert 18gig 2mb buffer ide
> 2x WDC Enterprise 4gig UW
> various maxtor, ibm, wdc ide drives; total of 7 drives
> creative sb32 'awe' isa
>
>
> Machine3: [very stable]        ip 9.9.9.3
> win95, winNT
> asus sp97-v [bought used]
> pentium 200MHz
> 3com Etherlink III pci
> Diamond s3 virge 2mb pci
> AHA-2940A
> WDC 2gig ide
>
>
> network hardware:
> 3com NICs in each machine
> Netgear [Bay Networks] DS-104 4port switching 100/10Mbit hub
> MonsterCable 6ft 100Mbit-rated CAT5
>
>
> ...This is definitely network-related, since Machine1 works fine when it's
> not on the network. Is it a 95 <--> 98 connectivity issue? Perhaps a win95
> 100Mbit issue? I haven't tested 100Mbit connectivity between two 95
> machines, b/c I don't have a 100Mbit NIC for machine3, & I'd rather not
> blow-away my 98 installation (machine2) at this time.

  As I recall, it took several tries to get NT drivers for the 905B
that were very stable.  Any chance there's a newer 95 driver from
3com?

> My friend told me NetBEUI is a superior protocol, faster, more-mature, etc.
> [but we've both heard rumors about its exploitability viz. the Net]. Could
> NetBEUI solve this? How does one set it up?

  NetBEUI can be faster in small networks such as yours.  I would not
say it was more mature than TCP/IP.
  As far as exploitability, that is NIL.  It is NetBIOS (which can
run over either NetBEUI or TCP/IP, and is presented to users as
"Windows Networking" -- Network Neighborhood, File & Printer Sharing,
and so on) which is exploitable.  [And in any case you shouldn't
connect this network to anybody else with your current TCP/Ip address
configuration....  See my comments above.]

  Not only is NetBIOS possibly faster in a small network, it's really
easy to set up.  Addressing is based entirely on the machine names
set up under "Identification" in the control panel, so as long as
they have unique machine names and the same workgroup name, you're
set.  To force use of NetBEUI, you may consider uninstalling TCP/IP,
but you could just un-bind it (and the TCP/IP WINS client) from
everything (under "Bindings" ...).

David G

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