On 5 Apr 2002, at 12:16, Nick Torraca wrote:

> Hello all,
> I just got hooked up to Roadrunner cable internet service. I have
> three Windows 98se computers connected through a Linksys 4 port
> router. We do file and print sharing among the computers and Netbui
> is installed. I am getting about 50kbs download speeds. I backed up
> my registries and have experimented with some of the speed tweaks.
> Nothing seems to have much effect, but raising the tcp/ip receive
> window to 32767 seemed to help on one machine. Other machines
> already had higher settings. One machine had no maxMTU registry
> entry. I was having poor performance dialing in on that unit.

> Anyway, I don't know what made me try it, but I forced one network
> card to 100mbs, half duplex. Download speed seems to be
> consistently around 300kbs now. I tried dropping back to half
> duplex on the other machines with similar great results. My
> question is, what I have I done and is there a downside or another
> underlying problem?

  In theory, full duplex offers better throughput, but only if your
network configuration ensures that collisions never occur.  A NIC
configured for full duplex cannot detect collisions, and so learns
that dtata must be retransmitted only when it times out without
getting an expected response.
  (I believe the 4-port LinkSys is a switch, so collisionless
operation should be *possible*.)

  Any chance that it was filing to negotiate 100 Mbps and falling
back to 10?

> Also, I would like to maintain reasonable dial-in quality. As I
> said, I have no MTU entries on the one machine that has been
> horrible at dialing in. How can I restore all of the tcp/ip stuff
> to original settings? I tried removing and re-installing DUN, but
> its still not there. There are other related things missing too.
> Looks like somebody already ran a cable speed tweak on the dialup.
> I'd like to get everything back to original and experiment from
> there.

> Do I need the Netbui to do file and print sharing? I'm wondering if
> that has something to do with half duplex mode fixing things.

  No.  File sharing can work over TCP/IP or even IPX.
  NetBEUI sends everything as broadcasts to the local network.  This
can limit the effectiveness of a switch versus a hub, but should not
by itself cause collisions in a switched environment.

> My little network work well for me, but I'm getting over my head.
> Thanks for any guidance here. -Nick

Dave Gillett

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