AlexHopmann.com

The newspapers today are reporting that Cisco has acquired Pure Networks. Congrats to the team, and to Cisco/Linksys which is getting itself a fine group of people and some great technology. Pure was always in a complicated marketplace but it makes a ton of sense to me that an industry leader like Linksys would see Software as a great advantage in making Networking easier for their customers. Plus it makes me feel like my decision to buy that Linksys WRT600N a few weeks ago was the right one.

Speaking of which- so far the WRT600N is performing really well, and I’m also using it with a WGA600N which is a dual-band N bridge that I’ve got to hook up equipment downstairs (the XBox, the Wii and the TV). There are two main problems I’ve had so far with the WRT600N. The first is that I named both my 5.4ghz and 2.4ghz networks with the same SID and its sometimes really unpredictable which network a given device has joined (and usually difficult to tell which one its connect to). This is partly a problem with the devices which don’t really communicate well which band they are on, but the router could help a lot here too. Its really confusing to figure out which devices are going to work best on which bands (between trying to balance distance, penetration through walls and media-playback performance). Messing around with it sometimes my TV (which acts as a media extender) works with awesome HD capability and sometimes its just crap. This seems like one of those things some intelligent home network management software could help with (hint hint).

The bigger problem is that for some reason its tunneling isn’t working. I love to use the remote access client to connect in to my home machines and I just can’t get that to work with this router. I can’t tell if its bugged or I’m doing something wrong, but the interface to set it up is actually less intuitive than normal (which is saying something).

I’ve had a Gigabit Ethernet network for quite some time but have mostly been using older Cat5 cables. They looked like they worked fine so why mess with them, right?

Lately I’ve been upgrading them with newer Cat6 cables. I just noticed a file-transfer that appears to be averaging 60megabytes per second or 60% utilization on the Ethernet. I’ve never gotten anywhere close to this performance before- it looks like the Cat6 stuff does make a big difference.

One of my home machines has terrible network performance. Its an older Shuttle SB51G but it appears to mostly be in good shape running Vista with all the latest driver updates. It tends to run about 100k bytes/sec on a 100mbps Ethernet connection to a local server that normally gives much much better results. The bandwidth usage (as show in taskman) jumps all over but never gets more than 2%.

It is plugged into my gigabit ethernet switch which has been handling traffic just fine including 100mbps connections. I tried switching the cables used to connect it. I’m pretty sure this machine used to have decent network performance. Doing a NETSTAT -E shows only 8 ethernet “errors” which doesn’t seem abnormally high. NETSTAT -S shows ~1000 TCP retransmits and ~1800 UDP errors, but its been running for a long time and again those aren’t especially high.

Any suggestions?

I’ve been using VMWare workstation to run some virtual machines lately. Its very helpful to be able to have a WinXP IE6 box, WinXP IE7, Vista, Linux, etc, all at once, not to mention other nice uses of VMWare.

So yesterday I’m doing some big file copies and noticing that my network transfer performance on my gigabit Ethernet is running a solid 6%. Not a blip over or under, as if something were hard-limiting it. I also notice there are these two extra network adapters that VMWare has installed which each think they are 100mbps connections.

So I try disabling them (since with a little poking around I find out they are only necessary if you are doing on-machine NAT or internal networks) and like magic my network transfers hop up to 9.5%. These get installed by default but for most people you will never need them, so get rid of them.

Now to figure out what the next bottleneck is. The machines involved have plenty of CPU, I was testing on multiple disks so disk IO should not have been limiting, and I’m pretty sure everything is hooked up with nice high quality cables on my gigabit switch.