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Conference turris::digital_unix

Title:DIGITAL UNIX(FORMERLY KNOWN AS DEC OSF/1)
Notice:Welcome to the Digital UNIX Conference
Moderator:SMURF::DENHAM
Created:Thu Mar 16 1995
Last Modified:Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:10068
Total number of notes:35879

9247.0. "Tulip excessive collison again..." by ITBG02::BONORA () Fri Mar 21 1997 04:05

Hi' folks,

we are experiencing a problem like that one in note 373.*
The Customer had installed two Etherswitch 10/100 form Cabletron
on his LAN. On one of this switches he had connected two Alphaserver
(one is a Sable and the other one is a A1000).
The ethernet interface installed on these system is the Tulip  chip.

He, has excessive ethernet collisions when copying files with ftp between 
the two systems, and he had timeout problem during network backup so the
backup procedure is aborted. I think he made backups with NSR.

The systems are running Dunix 3.2C and he had installed the patch
OSF350-214 but it didn't solve the problem.

I have red the discussions about Tulip on note 373 and 1873 but 
they aren't very clear for me.      
    
In there any solution to this problem ? 
Is the behaviour of the Tulip chip right ?

Thanks for any suggestion,

Regards

Leonardo 
 

    
                              
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9247.1Re: Tulip excessive collison again...QUABBI::"[email protected]"Fri Mar 21 1997 13:1346
[email protected] writes:

>Title: Tulip excessive collison again...

>we are experiencing a problem like that one in note 373.*

>He, has excessive ethernet collisions when copying files with ftp between 
>the two systems,

"Excessive collisions" is something entirely different than what was
discussed in the other two threads.  An excessive collision is declared
when a sender gives up after 16 tries.  For the TCP connections in the
other threads, the sender generally doesn't tie up the wire long enough
for excessive collisions to be a significant problem.

So you may have a different problem than those threads.   You might hunt
down ttcp and do some measurements with that instead of trying to
infer from NSR behaviour the similarities with the old cases.

 and he had timeout problem during network backup so the
>backup procedure is aborted. I think he made backups with NSR.

If NSR opens several TCP connections, then things might get interesting.
Also if it NSR uses reqquest/response protocol instead of streaming
a lot of data, it could behave somewhat differently than the cases
studied in the old threads.

>I have red the discussions about Tulip on note 373 and 1873 but 
>they aren't very clear for me.

Unfortunately, some of those postings are about a clear as they get.  If
you watch the traffic with a Sniffer or tcpdump (see note 2328) you'll
get a much better feel for Ethernet dynamics.    

>In there any solution to this problem ? 

There's a very good paper from Canada suggesting changes to Ethernet to avoid
the capture effect, but that doesn't apply to your situation.

>Is the behaviour of the Tulip chip right ?

As far as I know.
-- 
  <>    Eric (Ric) Werme   <>      This space under reconstruction       <>
  <>  <[email protected]>  <>                                            <>
[posted by Notes-News gateway]
9247.2SMURF::GILLUMKirt GillumFri Mar 21 1997 13:5415
    
    Yes, excessive collisions are a drag, but the Tulip is conforming the
    the Ethernet spec.  It does turn out that chips that don't conform to
    the Ethernet spec (take a longer Inter Packet Gap) can perform better 
    than chips that try to transmit as soon as possible.  The point of
    contention occurs immediately after a transmit completes when several
    adapaters (that respect the specified Inter Packet Gap) will all start
    transmitting therefore causing a collision, jam, and random exponential
    backoff.
    
    If you have a switch, why not run the Alpha servers in full duplex
    mode?  You'd get no collisions in full duplex.
    
    netstat -s -Itu0 will show more details about the collision counters.
    
9247.3Thanks...ITBG02::BONORATue Mar 25 1997 10:308
    
    Hi' 
    
    thank you very much for your reply,
    
    regards
    
    Leonardo