[Info-vax] Sudden problems with slow sftp transfers and slow disk accesses

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

gwilliams at cfa.harvard.edu wrote 2014-02-19 00:06:

> On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 4:42:27 AM UTC, gwil... at cfa.harvard.edu wrote:

>>
>> Image activation is slow.  It can take several seconds to begin
>> running an .exe stored on the shadow set.
>>
>> Gareth
>
> Many moons ago, the advice on VMS NICs was to set speed and duplex
> explicitly.

*And* doing that in the switches also, of course!

> At some point, the advice changed to auto-negotiate.
> We obviously missed that memo.

I do not think that there was a "memo" or any official "advice".
It's just something that have matured over time. The negotiation
logic has becom better standardized (or maybe better implemented).

*I* still set my Alphas hard to 100-FD and ask the network
guy to do the same in the switches. Works OK. Set-n-forget.

In my office (with s similar simple switch as you have) I set
my lab Alpha to auto-negotiate. Works just as well.

Now, what switches did you have in the old location?

>
> I have set all the interface cards to auto-negotiate (one machine
> is so old, its interface cards won't accept the /auto qualifier, but
> it hasn't been showing any duplex mismatches).  The SHOW DEV/INT
> command, which I had not previously used, was the key to fixing
> this.

Just one thing...
Next time you have a system "down", do check the setting the
console variables. I'm not sure here, but I do not think that
the online command in VMS propagates to the consol variables.
There is a slight risk that it has been set back efter a boot.


Jan-Erik.



>
> Thanks for all comments,
> Gareth
>