Firstly things have gotten much much worse. Average download speed has dropped to around 400 bytes/second. Sometimes higher.
I installed tcpdump to see what was happening, and my current diagnosis is that packets are actually travelling at the full 56kbps, it's just that there aren't enough of them to do sustained data transfer at that rate. A snippet from tcpdump -i ppp0: 18:20:17.666475 192.42.62.2.ftp-data > 10.0.90.171.32813: . 15625:16649(1024) ack 2 win 24820 (DF) 18:20:31.128909 10.0.90.171.ntp > 129.127.40.3.ntp: v4 client strat 4 poll 6 prec -17 (DF) [tos 0x10] 18:20:31.275981 129.127.40.3.ntp > 10.0.90.171.ntp: v4 server strat 3 poll 6 prec -11 [tos 0x10] 18:20:49.216553 192.42.62.2.ftp-data > 10.0.90.171.32813: . 14601:16061(1460) ack 2 win 24820 (DF) That's 32 seconds between ftp data packets (I had my desktop box doing a download at the time). Is there a pppd setting which tells it to do truncated exponential backoff or a magical iptables setting or something? stty also informs me that the serial port is running at the 57600 baud I asked it to. Next interesting fact: downloads *on* the firewall run *much* faster (but still far too slow). apt-getting tcpdump was running at about 2.8k/s. Removing all firewall/natting rules seem to have little/no effect on this. Any more ideas? James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
