ifconfig and trailers

[Greg Pavlov]

In article <3411 at vela.acs.oakland.edu>, schemers at vela.acs.oakland.edu (Roland Schemers III) writes:
> Hello! We are running Ultrix 4.0 on various machines: .........
> Someone suggested that we should have a -trailers option on our ifconfig 
> command in rc.local. He said it ehances network performance.
> 
> Here is part of the man page on ifconfig:
> 
>           trailers  Enables the use of a trailer link level encapsulation
>                     when sending.  This is the default.  ..........

  Your "somebody" was right in suggesting that you disable trailers  (tho I
  doubt that you will see very much difference in network performance: your
  cpus outrun your ethernet cards by a wide margin).  See mail on this issue
  two weeks ago: the trailers option is not all that standard anymore.

  Regarding the man page:  its one of those man pages that should have been
  revised years ago, since (in this case) it was written when systems were
  much, much slower - in all respects.


   greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny
   pavlov at stewart.fstrf.org