Appletalk slow on Xserve

[Anonymous]

We’ve got a new xserve running mac os x.3.6 server on a HP Gigabit switch.

All the os x clients run smoothly at their top speeds, but all OS9 (bleh) clients (who should have a 100mbit connection) connected to the Xserve only get full speed access for the first ten seconds after connecting, and after that slow down to a crawl. We’ve narrowed it down to an appletalk problem located on the server, because if i disable appletalk and connect to the server using Chooser–>server IP–>servers adress, i get full speed. We’ve got an old AIX server running Helios ethershare server, which doesn’t have the slow-down thingy, so i think its an xserve problem. The problem is that we need appletalk for printing from old clients, so just turning it off is no option.

Other stuff we tried, to no avail:
– Turning appletalk browsing off in server admin
– Separating os x and appletalk clients (one network device each)
– Turning off “allow secure connections”
– changing the “use_appletalk” value in netinfo manager (value doesn’t exist in 10.3.6) and we don’t even use netinfo for network management.
– forcing the network interfaces in the clients to 100 full duplex using the obscure duplexer app.

Any ideas (except for replacing all old macs with g5’s)??

[Anonymous]

Update… Disabling appletalk on the client does not work, it only took a bit longer for the amazing slow down thing to work. 😠

[Anonymous]

Some other stuff that might be helpful:

– There are two switches in the nework : a HP Procurve Gigabit switch and a Cisco catalist 10/100 switch, connected by two Cross cables. All the macs and the Xserve are on the HP, the rest is on the cisco. The spantree on the cisco is enabled, and if i disable it, it brings everything to a crawl (I effectively brought the whole company to a halt for about 10 minutes 😈 ).

Also, the problem exists only when reading from the server, writing to it goes full speed…

I tried the update to 10.3.8, but it didn’t help at all.
I also tried using the newer networking extensions panther adds to its classic folder, and again it didn’t do any good.

HELP ME!!

….please?
😈

[Anonymous]

Finally, progression:

I activated FTP, and it is showing the same behavior: fast the first few seconds, slow for the rest. Guess we can rule out appletalk or AFP as the bad guys. But it still is strange that i only get this problem when connecting to the xserve, and not the ethershare. Turning off delayed_ack wasn’t the answer either. At least we know its not a protocol problem…

[Author]

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