My USB is faster than my ethernet. Why? My ethernet is working but seems really slow uploading songs to the player. USB screams. What am I doing wrong?

Proud Owner of MK2 080000558 - 18gb Blue

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What am I doing wrong?

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Replace the wet string with Cat. 5 cabling.

Nick.

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18Gb blue (now AR red) - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)

Greetings!

Are you on a hub / public network / corporate network? Are you seeing a lot of traffic on your devices not related to you or the empeg?

If you are on a dedicated machine / crossover cable / no other traffic, are you certain of your settings? Netmask specifically. Also, check your LAN card settings. The empeg is only 10Mbps - you may want to see if your LAN card is configured to automatically select speed / duplex / etc.

Lastly, are you running any firewalls / virus checkers / network scanning utilities that might be getting in the way?

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB Green)

Yeah, debauch, I was going to say something similar.

Things I would check:

1) Are you using real category 5 cabling for this connection, or did you jerry-rig some sort of flat-cable solution?

2) Did you make the cables yourself, or did you purchase them pre-made from a company that really knows how to correctly wire a network cable?

3) (I'll bet no one else has thought of this one.) Have you used any utility programs which adjust your TCP/IP network settings to "improve" speed for downloading or playing games on the internet? For example, programs which change your RWIN or MAX MTU settings? For that matter, have you hand-altered any of these settings in the registry based on reading a web page somewhere? Once, I had a friend who used one of these utilities. It improved his Quake ping times by some miniscule amount, but then it totally hosed his LAN connection, making it nearly impossible to send and receive files via ethernet.

I'll bet it's the third one. Anyone want to make a wager on it?

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Tony Fabris

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I'll bet it's the third one

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Time to tell some strange stories. I've had various problems with Windows and separately both a 3com 3c905 card and a Micronet 100baseT hub.

The problem with the 3com card was that although Windows recognised it, said it was working fine etc. etc. it completely failed to use it properly - a quick meter on the cables showed that it was collision city and transfers seemed to be slower than a 10baseT connection. This prevailed despite numerous reboots while drivers and card settings were changed. The exact same card ran with no problems on my two Linux boxes. I bought a cheap (CHF30, GBP12, USD19) shop branded RTL8139 which has never failed me.

The hub was a strange one - seemed to work fine and its in built meter read utilisation at about 50-75% during heavy duty file transfers which, I thought, while not perfect, was usable. The setup I had at the time was one gateway/router with three network cards (cable modem, 10baseT network and 100baseT network). This caused me some problems (which I've now probably got enough experience to solve) to the point that I went out and bought a new hub - a dual speed switch - and ripped out one of the network cards. As a side effect of this, I noticed that my network was a damn sight faster. Too much so to put down to the way the switch divvied up the packets.

So, after all that, I guess I'm saying that it's possible that the problem experienced is something to do with incompatabilities (or crappyness) in the installed equipment. So, 94Cobra, any chance of some more information? What OS and version? Tell us about the cabling (crossover, hub, switch, routed etc. etc.). Tell us about the network card and its settings. Tell us about the IP addresses, netmasks, broadcast addresses. Tell us about name resolution (if you do any).

Nick
(who's pretty chuffed with himself cos he learned how to set up a DNS server for his local machines and managed to rebuild his internet gateway with no errors in only an hour - Oooh, I do like Slackware).

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18Gb blue (now AR red) - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)

I have a 10/100 autosensing switch running the home network. Three computers, no heavy traffic. Regular non crossover cables all around. Netmask is 255.255.255.0 on all machines. No firewalls. no network scanning utils.

I have Norton loaded, gonna see if that is a problem.

Proud Owner of MK2 080000558 - 18gb Blue

Greetings!

Two other thoughts that you might want to look at. The switch may not be handling the empeg properly, but (if you are able to connect) that is probably not likely. Another thought - if your PC is at 100 and the empeg is at 10, the switch would have to bridge your speeds. That might be a huge bottleneck. You might want to try forcing your PC down to 10 and see if that helps throughput to the empeg.

Random thoughts...

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB Green)

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Another thought - if your PC is at 100 and the empeg is at 10, the switch would have to bridge your speeds.

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Not only that, but there are some 10/100 switches which may work absolutely fine with all 100baseT devices attached, but which deliberately turn everything to 10baseT as soon as you plug one 10baseT device into them.

If your switch is doing this and your PC's network card is locked at 100baseT, then you're going to have massive problems (from absolutely nothing happening, to millions of collisions) as soon as that happens.

First off, you need to check how your NIC is configured in your PC. Is it locked at 100baseT or 10baseT or is it autodetect. Assuming that it is autodetect (or that you set it to 10baseT), I'd try a crossover cable direct from the PC to the Empeg to try to localise the problem - if that works fine, then it's your switch. If it doesn't then you need to try both the Empeg on a different PC and try a different NIC in your present PC.

Nick.


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18Gb blue (now AR red) - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)

From personal experience from connecting SUN-servers to cabletron switches, I can tell that there are a lot of incompatibilities in the autosensing-protocols from various hardware-vendors.
Especially the full-duplex negotiation doesn't work properly. The SUN starts the negotiation-sequence, which is unanswered, causing the SUN to retry endlessly.
As the protocol runs on a lower level than IP, all other IP-traffic will suffer from high collision-rates and network-errors. The solution ( for SUN's ) is to switch auto-negotiation off completely.

Frank van Gestel

you're right, if you search the BBS.. this was pointed out a while ago, the protocol used by the empeg in 1.0.x was not all that great, and bottlenecked the ethernet preformance. also, if you know, USB is 12mbit, and ethernet is 10mbit. the empeg's I/O bus can't handle more than that.

12gig red mk2 -- 080000125

I agree with Frank.

Try turning off autosensing on all equipment (except for the switch);
then set all equipment to 10-full, this should help (you wont notice a difference between 10 full and 100 half, believe me, unless you transfer gigs of data between the two pc's)

If that doesnt help, then set the individual ports to their respective speeds, 10full for the empeg, and 100full for the desktops, and set you nics to 100full in the nic's bios (the included diskettes usually have the included 3c5x9cfg.exe or something like that on the dos diskette), and the os driver win9x/NT/2K will allow for this

This should clear up and speed realted issues, but ultimatly the empeg player software and emplode need to have the error correction ripped out of the tcp-ip protocol, seeing as tcp-ip does it automagicaly (is that a word??)

Cheers

Smoker_Man
#080000449 MkII - 36Gb Blue

ultimatly the empeg player software and emplode need to have the error correction ripped out of the tcp-ip protocol

1.1; see this thread.

Peter

I've been having this same problem in my office. I have a 10/100 switch here. The office uplink is congested but shouldn't be relevant as both hosts are on the switch.

This is 2.0b11 and (not likely to matter) Hijack v280. If I keep the cables the same but put the empeg on another network (on a jack attached to a real switch, some Cisco thing, and not the Netgear thing here) it works much better, despite there now being a router between my desk and the empeg.

So, either:
-the bridge is bridging too much traffic to the empeg
or
-the bridge is doing something weird that's playing havoc on the empeg.

I use a 10/100 switch at home with my empeg, everything on the network but the empeg runs at 100, and all is well.

Eh, I'll just keep using the "experimental" network and hope none of my cow orkers crab

If it's a 10/100Mb/s auto-switching hub, it might drop down to 10Mb/s when it sees the empeg, including the traffic between your desktop and the rest of the net. Meaning that there's more congestion, and all traffic is restricted. Which you notice more with your music uploads because they're long and busy (and because you can't wait to hear your new music ).

Putting your player onto a different switch means that you're not restricting the one attached to your workstation, so the traffic between it and the rest of the net isn't affected, and only the traffic to the empeg has to go through a 10Mb/s switch.

I'm no network guru, though - that's just what I picked up from other discussions here.

How about just downloading the database? It takes 30 seconds or so with a wireless segment in between and more than 5 minutes to not even be halfway done with just the 10/100 switch between machines?

I don't buy it; There's already 10 devices on the bridge, including a hub with an old AIX box and www.dementia.org on it.

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more than 5 minutes

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Ouch! That sounds bad for merely pulling the databases...

How long does it take by serial? Not much different, I'd expect.

Here's a tcpdump that seems to work. It should at least help you figure out if the empeg is being overloaded with traffic.

Edit: Sorry. That attachment was way too big. Check the next post for a compressed version.

tcpdump.

Requires me to be able to attach serially and I left the cable at home;-)

Well, bring it tomorrow. (Don't you have telnetd installed yet?)

(Don't you have telnetd installed yet?)

I refuse to use unencrypted telnet and I'm not putting kerberos on the empeg (yet)

So a clear protocol that isn't using a password is worse than an encrypted one, also without a password?

So a clear protocol that isn't using a password is worse than an encrypted one, also without a password?

sure. see also: can used kerberized telnet to require authenticated connections. a good idea on a university network where anyone could log onto my empeg!

you could also use a crossover cable and connect directly to the empeg.
You could even add an additional NIC card to your machine just for this purpose.
10BaseT cards are like what, 5 cents now?

plus $6 shipping. ;/

Just to insert my solution:

I have one of these. It's a 10BaseT NIC with a 4 port hub built in. Sure, I got mine at $16 a few years ago, but I use it often. My computer uses wireless, so I rarely need a wired connection. This card is great for hooking up the empeg and other computers without hunting for a crossover. Just my $.02.

Cool unit, is there a 100Mbit version of that thing ?

It's not my machine, so adding random stuff to it really isn't something I want to do if i can avoid it

Sure, I got mine at $16 a few years ago, but I use it often.

And now it's only double that. Eh.

Maybe I just have the "cheap" bug up my

anyhow...

I've never seen a 100Mbit version. If I find one, I will buy it.