Tuning NFS (and Gbit Enet ?)

[Paul Lussier]

"Scott C. Mellott" <scott at mellott.com> writes:

> What specific issues do you have with the Dell/SMC switches?  We've
> sold hundreds of them with a very low RMA rate.

With Dells, they're slow, difficult to debug, difficult to deal with,
and just plain don't work under heavy loads (Hmm, sounds a lot like a
basic description of everything Dell makes :)

We've had them suffer from "split-brain" syndrome where, on a 48 port
switch, the left 24 ports can't communicate with the right 24.
Evidently this was a known problem with Dells a while back.  Since
then we've stopped using them all together.

With SMC, the newer ones seem better, but we've had lots of problems
with their "Tiger Switch" series in the past where ports would just
become completely inoperable if the system connected to that port
disconnected for any length of time.  For example, if a laptop left
with it's owner for the night, when it was reconnected in the morning,
the port wouldn't come back on-line.  The only thing that would fix it
would be a power-cycle.  That's a rather painful solution on a loaded
48-port switch.

More recent SMC switches seem to behave a little better.  However,
given a choice, I'd still opt for Netgears over either SMC or Dell.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul