I have an older SMC ethernet card in a Northgate 486. On boot up, it properly recognizes it as a western digital chip set.
The base install goes without a hitch. Then I nfs mount a local mirror, and start the install. This works, but painfully slowly. E.g. ls /debian takes several minutes to return. The nfs server is not on my subnet. Thinking that it may be nfs parameter problems, I increased timeo for the mount to 30 (3 seconds) dropped retrans to 1 so that it would go through it's wait cycle faster. This didn't make a noticeble difference. I also played with rsize, running it up to the 8K that is more typical for nfs. Thinking that it was some weird permissions/security/validation problem, I tried a mount from another machine on the same subnet. That one can complete an ls -lR many times faster than the install box can do an ls. If the ethernet driver is wrong, it shouldn't work at all. If the server is at fault, I should get the same slug behaviour from all clients. Ideas as to what's happening? Sherwood Botsford | 403 492 5728 except 3713 on even dates in Jan, Physics Dept | Mar,Jun,Jul,Sept, & Oct, and odd dates in the other U of Alberta | seven months. Either number possible on holidays & Edmonton, AB, | weekends. Neither during last 3 wks of June, or T6G 2J1 | first wk of Sept. Faxen 0714, Physics, 6826 Math.
