I thought I just could replace my 100 Mbit switch with a gigabit switch. Man was I wrong......
Setup: Gigabit network interface on Server. Sun Ray Server Software 4.2 ea 2 Solaris Nevada Build 123 Sitecom Network Gigabit Switch Linksys SLM2008 Gigabit Switch Linksys SRW2008 Gigabit Switch Sun Ray 270 Stress test: Open Eye of Gnome image viewer on the Sun Ray and click through about 30 high resolution images Situation 1: SR Server <-------> SR 270 This works perfect! Situation 2: SR Server <----> Gigabit switch <-----> SR 270 There is packet loss. The build up of the images is hampering and I see stripes instead of blocks. So what went wrong? I remembered the post in November 2007 in which Kent explained this phenomenon: "The traffic is sent in little bursts at 10 ms intervals. Since it's briefly sent at 10x the rate that the output port can handle on the switch, some buffering is required on the switch. Bad switches (or switches configured to toss UDP packets easily) don't do this buffering correctly." So I arranged for the two more expensive Linksys switches. But all three 8 port switches (Sitecom and Linksys) gave the same results. Although larger 24 port switches probably have enough memory to buffer, most 8 port switches apparently do not. As a result the user performance is very bad. Does anyone know about an 8 port Gigabit switch with enough buffer memory? Should the buffer memory be at least the size of the Solaris server udp buffer size or should it be bigger? Workaround hangs server network interface! As suggested in earlier e-mails to the list I reduced the server port on the Linksys SLM2008 from auto-negotiate (1GB) to 100Mb fixed. This resulted in less striping but to my surprise the servers network interface died after clicking through about 20 pictures in Eye OG. The same thing happened when I tried it with the Linksys SRW2008 switch. The only workable solution I found was on the SRW2008. It is: Leave the port setting "auto-negotiate" on "enable" but change the "admin advertisement" from "Max capability" to "100 Full" This will remove all striping and it does not hang up the network interface on the server. My question: Is this bug (dead Gigabit server interface) for Opensolaris or for SRSS 4.2? As for ease of Sun Ray adoption world wide..... There should be a better workaround than to reduce bandwidth. Kind regards, Ivar _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
