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    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

  1. R

    Does Wi-Fi MultiMedia (WMM) Really Do Anything?

    It may be covered in part two or not. In order to implement QOS the hardware has to have the ability to store a queue of packets, and then be able to transmit them in a different order than received. This is obviously more complex than a simple no buffering transmit as you receive. The part...
  2. R

    Wireless n router, gigabit network and ADSL2+

    I have the DGND3300 and the ethernet ports are indeed 10/100. I'd be rather amused to know exactly what the device does with Wireless-N traffic arriving at 270MBps since it can't go to the ethernet or DSL ports that fast, and if sending to another wireless device then they'd have to share the...
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    ATEN CS661 Laptop USB KVM Switch Reviewed

    This has got to be the dumbest product ever. It is Windows only, and only works once Windows is up and running (eg you can't see BIOS boot screens). The only benefit is if the two machines can't contact each other over the network, but you could just plug another network cable directly between...
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    How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

    I should be clear that I was using network monitoring programs and was only interested in what was sent over the wire. I didn't see any appreciable difference in behaviour although some programs changed behaviour (eg Explorer did some things in parallel which resulted in parallel SMB1...
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    How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

    A bit of history will help explain it. SMB1 was originally designed by IBM and used in XENIX (a Microsoft flavour of UNIX!), DOS and OS/2. It later ended up in 16 bit Windows (aka for workgroups) and in 32 bit Windows (aka NT). Over time things accumulated in the protocol. For example files...
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    How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

    There are two block sizes involved. One is the block size used by the program (or the CopyFile api). The second are the block sizes used by the kernel redirector. As an example the program could request 32kb, and the kernel could read two 16kb blocks to satisfy that. Or the kernel could...
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    How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

    That is not correct. Microsoft could make the kernel redirector perform equally well (well maybe a percent or two difference) for both SMB1 and SMB2. They chose not to touch SMB1 and only make improvements when using SMB2. You need the same basic post-XP kernel. Samba 4 has support for...
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    How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

    If you are using file copy speed then you are really testing the interaction of the FileCopy api and whatever Microsoft are doing in the kernel redirector this week. The resulting number is only peripherally related to what the underlying hardware is capable of. If you use something like...
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    How To Build a Really Fast NAS - Part 6: The Vista (SP1) Difference

    It is important to distinguish between what happens in user space vs what the kernel and network filesystem redirectors can do. This applies to Windows and the other operating systems such as Linux. There is a read call which points to where the resulting data will be placed, how much to...
  10. R

    Linksys WRT610N Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router Reviewed

    SMB and FTP are disk limited. You didn't say what you did over SSH but if it was SCP then that is disk limited too, and SSH also consumes more CPU to do the encryption/decryption. The standard tool for measuring network throughput is iperf.
  11. R

    Request for NAS review: Galaxy 3500MGB-RAID Pro

    Short answer: Click Applications then Add/Remove and enter "backup" in the search field Long anwser: It depends on exactly what you want to backup. If you have up to 2GB and especially multiple machines then many people love dropbox. It supports Linux, Mac, Windows and the web, and once out...
  12. R

    Has Networking Lost Its Mojo?

    Bob! The holy grail in the corporate world is the "Branch Office Box". Consider the current needs of someone working from home or an office of up to 5 people. They need VPN, WAN optimisation, security (ie protection from potentially malicious incoming traffic, health screening and protection...
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    Gigabit Ethernet Need-to-Know

    I want them from the machine performing the operations (aka iozone machine) since that shows what the user experiences. Captures from the NAS would show you the processing time for requests. If possible also include captures from the previous slow setup as then I can tell you what the...
  14. R

    Gigabit Ethernet Need-to-Know

    I could only make guesses. To get the correct answer you need to run Wireshark and analyse the traces. I'd be happy to look at traces if you want. Email me a link to the traces or the traces themselves (my email server will accept mail up to 100MB in size). As to the speculation, writes...
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    Gigabit Ethernet Need-to-Know

    (I've been doing this kind of stuff for many years both personally and professionally. It is certainly easier to pickup over long periods of time than just jumping in the deep end!) I'd certainly focus on Mac and Windows for the clients. Other than backend render farms, there aren't any...
  16. R

    Wireless router with *incoming* QOS

    It looks like from various web postings that DD-WRT does indeed support incoming QOS. As I pointed out, it is also messy to implement as you basically need to convince the sender to send less traffic. This can be done by discarding already received traffic as the sender will then realise there...
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    Wireless router with *incoming* QOS

    Almost all the devices provide outgoing QOS, which roughly amounts to ordering the traffic to be sent according to configured rules. I am looking for incoming QOS which means the device will have to deliberately discard or delay lower priority traffic already received from the WAN before...
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    Gigabit Ethernet Need-to-Know

    An easy way to detect Samba is to use WireShark and record the connection (use a capture filter of "port 139 or port 445"). The client sends NegotiateRequest and then look in the NegotiateResponse sent by the server in the capabilities field. 5th from the end is "Unix extensions". If that is...
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    Gigabit Ethernet Need-to-Know

    A little out of the scope of "your small network" :-) You may wish to attend the annual CIFS conference. See http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2008/ and also look on the Samba mailing lists for when their developers will be around. A lot of the CIFS attendees are video companies...
  20. R

    Gigabit Ethernet Need-to-Know

    I was also involved in the Thin Client industry. The fundamental problem there is that Thin Client was perceived as a hardware issue. To my mind it is actually entirely a systems management issue with the hardware being mostly irrelevant. The simple measure is "If the machine in front of a...
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