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SubjectIPX overbroadcasting (was: Linux 2.2.13pre1)
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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