Slow Network

Hi,

I should have a 100 Mbps network. I have a WinXP machine with a 3Com
3c905TX card, and a Linux machine, kernel 2.4.20, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
(muchly upgraded), running the same network card.

On FTPing to the Linux server, Im starting off having fairly high Mbps,
close to 100... then a second later its at about 80, then 70, then 50...
then the transfer seems to even out at about 25 Mbps.

The only refrences I've seen so far on the newsgroups to these
particular network card being slow, is where they've been excruciatingly
slow... like 10 Kbps.

Samba also appears to be similarly slow.

Any ideas what I should be looking for?

The Linux computer is currently a Intel Celeron 533 Mhz with 256 Mb of
RAM. I dont think the computer speed is all that important, since I was
getting these speeds on a lowly Pentium 133Mhz with 50Meg of RAM. The
hard drives are fairly small, and fairly old, but otherwise reliable. Im
just wondering if the fact that the hard drives are around 4-5 years
oldcould possibly be in issue? Its running EXT3FS.

The XP machine, has an AMD Athlon XP 2000 processor and 512Mb of RAM.

I guess the questions I need answering, is why is my network slowing
down on a connection to 25Mbs...

And 2, why 25 Mbps?

And 3, how can I improve this?

Im currently thinking either new network cards, or new switch?

Cheers
Simon

In article <bjgao2$ik1tr$(E-Mail Removed)>, Simon Dean wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I should have a 100 Mbps network. I have a WinXP machine with a 3Com
> 3c905TX card, and a Linux machine, kernel 2.4.20, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
> (muchly upgraded), running the same network card.
>
> On FTPing to the Linux server, Im starting off having fairly high Mbps,
> close to 100... then a second later its at about 80, then 70, then 50...
> then the transfer seems to even out at about 25 Mbps.
>
> The only refrences I've seen so far on the newsgroups to these
> particular network card being slow, is where they've been excruciatingly
> slow... like 10 Kbps.
>
Someone is being silly and is mixing half/full duplexs and probably you have
thrown in a hub instead of a switch. Hubs can only do half duplex and
switches can be el-cheapo.

One all your computers force the network card to half duplex (linux would
be 100baseTx-HD).

Under linux 'mii-tool -F 100baseTx-HD eth0', under windoze, insert debian CD
install and type 'mii-tool -F 100baseTx-HD eth0'.

Regards

Alex