The last three times I tried to post on /., I got some error about an open proxy - interesting, since my proxy config hasn;t changed in a year - and even more intreresting when I reconfigured with no proxy at all. I sent the obligatory email to cowboy neal, who ignored me. If this post bombs, my participation here is done.

The erratic I/O speeds weren't SuSE, it was my hardware. My eyes must be worse than I thought - I put the wrong speed CPU in the motherboard last time I upgraded. Sheesh.

WOW! Gentoo is fast on older hardware, and after you get the hang of portage, I like the idea of only installing stuff you need. Of course, the initial bootstrap is extremely slow and picky, but hey - no pain, no gain. I still haven't figured out why net I/O speed is so erratic in Suse 9.2 lately.

I just don't get it. The hardware didn't change from 9.1 and 9.2 (aside from a few disk drives - never another Maxtor!) why the hell is the speed so erratic? A 3 gig file transfers in 20 minutes today, an hour tomorrow. I think I'm going to try Gentoo or Slack, just for grins. But only on a server - SuSE still rocks on the user desktop.

I keep finding stuff I didn't know was in here and don't understand how to use... grrrr.