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Old 9th April 2012
Smith Smith is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Posts: 14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
It may be your cardbus, but it has been noted in official OpenBSD documentation that the older Realtek rl(4) based cards are relatively poor performers. The rl(4) man page lists three long paragraphs about poor documentation and the choices made by the driver designer, under the BUGS section.

The Realtek Wikipedia entry quotes FreeBSD driver documentation in source code (the citation is buried in footnote #1) that calls the 8139 some very terrible things. See the section in that page under Criticism and Praise. Do note that just below the FreeBSD notation, Theo De Raadt is quoted as praising other NICs from Realtek.
Thank you thank you thank you ... pointing me toward this tree to bark up has probably saved this poor soul from trying to entrust personal files via an open port on the public internet .... to the Penguin. I do realize nothing in the world is 100% secure but now I will worry a lot less ..

After some googling based on this info, it turns out that amongst many other strange things that this realtek 8139 card does, is this one: it fails to correctly autonegotiate duplex. I tested forcing the duplex settings on the receiving and sending end, and lo, now ftp reports a transfer rate of 831 kbytes/sec for a 100mb file. This is something like 7 mbits/s (instead of 0.16 mbit/s) and for my modest needs something that I can live with. This computer is ancient, after all. Thank you and the OpenBSD team for allowing my old war horse to eventually die with dignity after a long life of service.

( These are some of the helpful quotes from monkey.org I finally found from back in 2003, sorry not able to post links

openbsd/archive/misc/0312/msg00227.html
"autonegotiation sometimes gets you mismatched duplex settings."
"This is probably the most important thing to check"

openbsd/archive/misc/0312/msg00206.html
From Theo de Raadt, "You get what you pay for." )
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