Subject: network problems with cobalt raq2

From: Dennis Grevenstein <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 02:04:52 +0200

Hi,

I've got some problems with my raq2. I want to set up the machine
as an internet gateway, because it can be perfectly silent if
you change that little fan.
The problem is that network performance is extremely bad.
I can transfer about 1MB/s at the very best. When it runs as
a masquerading router for my internal network performance
goes down even more. I can now ftp about 64kb/s to the raq.
Of course, I didn't expect that this little CPU would be a killer
router, but:
tessa:~# uptime
 02:01:21 up 55 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

There is essentially no load.This machine is about 95% idle.

I'm running Debian and the standard 2.4.26-r5k-cobalt.
I could not compile the current CVS kernel, but any hints
are greatly appreciated.

TIA
Dennis

-- 
de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.
Three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

---

From: Martin Michlmayr <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 18:17:51 +0100

> a masquerading router for my internal network performance

I just tested on my RaQ2 and I get up to 2500kB/s via FTP.  This is
in my LAN with a 100 MBit switch.

Which network device do you use (the first or second)?  What's your
setup?  Do you get such low rates also when you simply do FTP without
any masquerading or other stuff?
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
[email-masked]

---

From: Dennis Grevenstein <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 03:22:10 +0200

Hi,

> in my LAN with a 100 MBit switch.

Hmm. Maybe this is really the maximum...
 
> any masquerading or other stuff?

Okay. This is the current state:
I could finally compile the current CVS kernel + the Cobalt
patches from http://www.colonel-panic.org/cobalt-mips/
The Raq2 is now running 2.6.7-rc3. With this upgrade
everything got bettter, but it's still not perfect.
With the standard Debian ftpd connections begin with about
2.5MB/s, but then drop to 1.37MB/s. Using vsftpd it's
similar, but the transfer rate doesn't drop so much.
I can get about 1.67MB/s. There is no real difference
whether firewalling/masquerading is used at the same time
or not. I'm just a bit confused because I was told by
another Raq2 owner that he could get transfer rates of about
6 or 7MB/s using the current CVS kernel. I did all my
tests by transferring the ungzipped gcc-3.4.0 tarball.
That's 182MB. The nice thing is that I can now
transfer a big file via ftp without killing the whole
machine. With 2.4.26 beginning an ftp transfer made
all other connections unuseable. Outgoing SSH
connections dropped down so much that I could wait
for every typed character to appear. Maybe it's
a good idea to file a Debian bug report. Their
standard kernel seems to be problematic.

Anyway, the network problems didn't go away completely.
I had one "almost" network freeze with the new kernel
resulting in lots of dropped packages and transfer rates
similar to what I described in my first mail. Restarting
the network solved this.

tessa:~# ifconfig eth0 
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:10:E0:00:31:F5  
          inet addr:192.168.2.10  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::210:e0ff:fe00:31f5/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:4314429 errors:2 dropped:10412 overruns:0 frame:5
          TX packets:3013429 errors:23 dropped:0 overruns:4 carrier:19
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:1151870219 (1.0 GiB)  TX bytes:1305479776 (1.2 GiB)
          Interrupt:19 

My current setup is like this: I have connected eth0 to
a 100Mbit switch and eth1 to a gateway router via 10MBit.
The box has about 1 day uptime now and works stable at
the moment. I'm waiting for the next network freeze...

ANother thing worth noting is that after upgrading to 2.6.7-rc3
I have the same problem with "df" that was described on this
list before: 
tessa:~# df 
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
df: `/': Invalid argument
df: `/proc': Invalid argument
df: `/sys': Invalid argument
df: `/dev/pts': Invalid argument
df: `/dev/shm': Invalid argument
df: `/boot': Invalid argument
df: `/export': Invalid argument

strace gives the same info as it was described in the past.

All in all, I'm very interested in any possible improvement.
I need a low cost server that is silent enough that I can
sleep in the same room and this Cobalt seems like a very
good candidate (after replacing the small fan of course).
thanks for your help.

mfg
Dennis

P.S.
I'm not on the list. I'm reading this list via a web-gateway.