On 2004-09-27, No More Spam <uce@ftc.gov> wrote:
> I've got a nagging problem that I just cannot seem to solve. I have
> three machines all attached to a Dell 2216 switch. I get fantastic
> speeds over FTP between the XP and Debian machine - 95 Mb/s up and 99
> Mb/s down. This leads me to believe all the cables, nics and hardware
> are good.

Better check them anyway. Could very well be a split pair between your
OBSD box and the switch. Are these stock or homemade cables?


> The problem is between the XP and OBSD 3.5 machine. If I try to transfer
> data using the SCP protocol I cannot get better than 7 Mb/s. I do not
> want to run FTPD on the OBSD machine since it acts as my DSL firewall.

Note that scp adds a crypto layer. This is computationally intensive.
So you're comparing apples with oranges here. Better temporarily enable
ftp (or use ftp from the obsd box to the debian box) for testing.


> The OBSD machine is a P3, 500Mhz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 15GB ATA/66 drive
> and a dual port Intel server nic running OBSD 3.5 and OpenSSH 3.9. I've
> tried setting the nic to auto-select, and 100 Full-duplex. Either way it
> makes no difference.

A 500MHz celeron is probably not enough to sustain 100Mb/sec of crypto.
If you run top(1) I'd expect you see the machine running at high cpu usage.
What of the other boxes' hardware? Might be the case for the XP box, too.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .