Debian/PPC problems - continued

[Marcin Owsiany <porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl>]

Hello again!

First of all i downloaded and compiled new Apt, a few minutes i ran it for
the first time, the official package was there :)
Now Apt works just great, no more complaints.

However the rest of the problems persist - i investigated them a bit more
closely.

as for the network problems:

results are at least amazing

I checked how does files transfer work.
I made 4 tests (well, 5 if you count frequent apt-get upgrade runs, which
runs with no problems with all packages, despite their size)

oh, the hostname of the box is maczek

1. uploading to maczek
2. downloading to maczek
 - these two work with no problems with any file size

3. downloading from maczek
4. uploading from maczek
 - now results of these two are more complicated:
* with files less then 1100 bytes of size, everything works fine
* with files between 1100 to 1200 bytes of size - the effect varies - usually
when the size is closer to 1100, the file gets transfered, but with some
minor slowdown. The closer to the 1200 bytes border, the slower the file
gets transfered. With 1200 an average is 3 seconds!!! which HUGE if you
consider a 100Mbps Ethernet
* I could not force any file larger than 1300 bytes to get through, at least
in time < a few minutes.
In case you wonder, there is actually no traffic on the network.

The situation seems to be similar with SMTP. (I use Exim) I haven't
investigated it that close, but i checked that large messages (300kb) cannot
get out of the box. (Such messages can get inside, though)

I think this might be some kernel or libc buffer problems or something
similar.
I doubt this is a hardware problem, though it is possible
dmesg says:

 eth0: MACE at xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, chip revision 9.64

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx  
          inet addr:xxx.xxx.xxx.xx  Bcast:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Mask:255.255.255.128
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:22610 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:17355 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:14 Base address:0x1000 

pinging either host during transfer does not help.

As for the remote shell access - i installed ssh, and it causes the shell to
freeze az well. I think this is caused by some control characters sent to
the pty. I tracked it down to e.g following two cases:

while less-ing some (text) file i press some up-arrows, some down-arrows.
Everything is OK. But if I press SPACE then, the image freezes. Also running
some text-graphics programs cause this. (like configuration of debconf)
I also noticed that it is not the terminal that freezes, because when i use
the following setup:

[my laptop]  -ssh--> [box1] --ssh--> [box2] ->{"screen"}->--ssh-->[maczek]

the screen's control combinations (CTRL-A + something)  still work when the
shell is frozen.


The ircd's bugs page is almost unpopulated. I'm going to change this :-)

if anybody has any ideas, i'd be glad to hear them

regards
Marcin



-- 

---------------------------------
Marcin Owsiany
porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl
---------------------------------