bps/460/passport8600 problem with OSX

[yuggy]

ok first of all, i have a network with mixed in bps2000, baystack 460 and 6 passport8600.
we have performance problem coming from mac OSX machines at 100 mbps. when we lock the port at 10 mbps, it works ok - for a 10 mbps -
if we take the same machine, crank it up with OS9, all is fine, in 10 or 100 mbps.

what i want to know is if you guys have seen this anywhere?
the guy from apple say its nortel the trouble, and guess what, the guy from nortel say its apple...

i'm not an apple guy by the way, i only work on pc, but i do manage the network so they say its a network problem..

anybody?

 

[Billcssh]

Hi yuggy, we are in the same boat.

I have about the same setup as yours.

Two 8610 in core network
four 8606 in distribution

And a mix of BPS2000 and Baystack 460.


Same kind of problem to, one server in MacOsX with one station In MacOsx When the OSx Station is in autonegociate, we have no performance at all. When we force the OSX Station to 10 Mbits, every thing goes well.

When a put the server and the station in the Passport it's work well.

I'm in contact with a Nortel guy and we are working on that problem on friday.

I'll give you some feedback if we find something.

 

[netmanrick]

What about the MTU setting on OSX vs the Nortel stuff.
I find that working with MACs is like working with early UNIX stuff.

That's my $.02 worth.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations

 

[MaxNN]

what about the NIC and the drivers of the MAC ? We had similar case some years ago but with other vendors.

 

[anthonyanderberg]

Could this be a duplex mis-match? Perhaps the Ethernet cards in the macs are coming up at full duplex and the switch ports are coming up at half duplex, the result of which would be lots of undetected collisions and weird slowness. It seems like the results of auto negotiation can vary widely from driver to driver so be sure you're setting both the speed and duplex on both sides. MTU is a good suggestion as well, and worth looking into.

 

[yuggy]

we have tried setting the port speed at 100 mpbs full duplex in the nortel switch and in the macs too. no luck, still something wrong. but for now, we cant reproduce it anymore, and we havent changed anything at all...

damn macintosh

still looking into it.
if you have any suggestion, feel free...

 

[SFSRJSTW]

This could be way off base, but when we upgraded our Business Policy Switches, and some of our 470's to one of the software releases, they had problems supporting the Mac's and AppleTalk. Unfortunately, I can't remember the exact release. We worked with Nortel and beta tested some code that fixed the problem. That fix is now included in the most current software for the BPS and the 470. Not sure if that helps your problem or not, but it did clear up all our Mac issues, and might be worth a try.