Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 30 Aug 1999 18:27:11 -0500 | From | "Gregory T. Norris" <> | Subject | IPX overbroadcasting (was: Linux 2.2.13pre1) |
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Ok, here's what I found out...
The IPX patch included in 2.2.13pre1 does indeed appear to fix the intended problem. During past testing, it's *never* taken more than 15 seconds for the flood of IPX broadcasts to begin, with 2-5 seconds being more usual. Merely bringing up the IPX interface was all that was required... it wasn't necessary for the system to be actually doing anything with the packets.
I brought the IPX interface up yesterday evening, and let the machine sit passivly for about 30 minutes. No sign of trouble. Ran slist and some other misc. IPX-related commands a few times. No problem.
Then something interesting happenned... I ran yet another slist, and suddenly everything else (as far as I could see, anyway) started timing out. I had to disconnect the machine from the network fast, because we had several machines crash last time we had an IPX flood. But then after disabling and reenabling the IPX interface, I wasn't able to recreate the problem (so I couldn't get the tcpdump you wanted). I'll keep trying to reproduce this, and pass along additional information when it becomes available. Because of how hard the IPX floods hit our network, I'll probably only be able to attempt it fairly late on Sunday nights... so it might take awhile.
In any event, I suspect that this is a seperate problem. Around mid-December there was a thread titled "2.2.0-pre1/Token-Ring/IPX = bad" which appears to describe this quite well. An individual was experiencing a flood of directed (non-broadcast) packets when he ran slist, which occurred once or twice and was thereafter unreproducable. The truly interesting bit, however, is that he and I were both on token-ring networks using the oltr driver (@&#%!!! binary-only) from Olicom (while the broadcast-flood problem was affecting ethernet users with "normal" drivers as well).
To make a long story short (too late!), I think the patch very substantially improved the reliability and useability of IPX.
Thanx!
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