Ethernet bugs on Sun SPARC systems.

[Michael G. Beirne]

In article <8507 at brazos.Rice.edu> beirne at richsun.cpg.trs.reuter.com (Michael G. Beirne) writes:
>I have discovered two problems with the SPARC systems ethernet interfaces.
>
>1. "spray localhost" loses about 10% of the packets sent. This doesn't
>   sound bad until you realize that localhost packets don't leave the system
>   and are just looped back in the kernel.

This has been explained as not a problem as spray uses UDP/RPC and the
SPARCstation is able to overrun the local ethernet buffers and since UDP
is unreliable this is fine although misleading.

>2. The SPARC systems can in certain circumstances put out bad ETHERNET
>   packets with both the destination and SOURCE addresses wrong.
>    for i in `ypcat hosts|awk '{print $1}'`;do ping $1 3;done

This I have found is not a SPARCstation problem but a problem with several
systems that use a very old and locally ported version of NRC's Fusion
software.  The people who did the port are no longer working for
Rich/Reuters and the source was never put into SCCS so I guess I'll have
to live with the problem. We do have a newer version of NRC's Fusion that
does not have the same problem.

I apologize to Sun for wrongly maligning their software.

Michael G. Beirne
beirne at richp1.UUCP or beirne at richsun.cpg.trs.reuter.com
or more reliably beirne at limerick.chi.il.us