Journal Sax Maniac's Journal: Free box... weird packet loss 2
I got a free computer from my father's friend over the break. Not bad, 2ghz 1G RAM, good enough for the kids to use, and will be a big step up from their old P3. I haven't done much fooling around with hardware, so I figure it would a good way to finish off the rest of the vacation.
The guy was getting rid of it because it was too slow. Turns out he tried to shoehorn XP Professional in a 5GB partition. The other 95GB partition was unused! I'm not an IT guy, but I bet this crap happens all the time.
Windows was inconsolable. I tried various things to clean it up, figuring XP Pro might be worth saving. In the end it was just borked, complaining about CRC errors for mouse drivers of all things. I don't have any XP installation media laying around and certainly didn't feel like dealing with XP activation, so... out comes the Ubuntu disk. A half-hour laters I've got a snappy new box devoid of Windows garbage. If only Linux ran Shockwave browser games, the kids would be perfectly content with it.
So, I let it download updates for a while, and let it max out the DSL line for an hour or so. Worked great.
Later on that night, I notice the connection is really slow, as in 10kb/sec slow. A little poking around and I'm getting 30% packet loss on a wired connection between the box and the router about 6 inches away. Everything else on the net is fine with sub-2ms pings. Changed cables, no improvement. Nope, it's just the box's ethernet card itself.
I've never seen anything like this. WIRED! The crazy powerline ethernet and wireless links never drop packets like this!
Finally I disable the onboard ethernet and drop in an old reliable 3com, and presto, it's mostly fixed. What the hell? What changed?
Well, the only thing that changed in the meantime was I switched out the video card, replacing a GeForce MX with a dual-DVI FX. Some card I found laying around with 2 big honkin' fans on it. Could that be sucking up too much juice and screwing up the onboard ethernet? I guess I'll swap the cards tonight to see what's going on, but this is really strange.
I was hoping to keep the DVI, as I figured I'll eventually repurpose this box as a HTPC if I ever find the time.
Hmmmm (Score:1)
Contrary to popular belief, that is possible... Provided you separate the applications to another partition. (Or have very very few applications). The C: on the machine I type this on has 5Gig of which 4.5Gig are used (but much of it can be removed, since it's backups of updates: about 535Meg. On top of that there are another 500Meg in my Desk
Re: (Score:1)
Ha, the guy wasn't quite that smart. 5GB for the OS AND home (oops, "Documents and Settings") AND bin (oops, "Program Files")? Disaster.
If I wasn't clear: the weird part is that I downloaded about 500MB of updates flawlessly over the onboard NIC first with no packet loss. I did a bunch of other things, which included changing the video card. Then I noticed later I had packet loss. Then I changed out the NIC, and the new NIC did fix the problem -- but I'm still wondering what introduced it, since it worke