VLAN update (by alaric)
Ok, suspecting that the MTUs might be a problem, I put an fxp ethernet card into the single PCI slot in my home server (ousting the SCSI card), since that card can support the large Ethernet frames required to have a standard 1500 MTU plus 802.1Q VLAN tags.
But, alas, things were little better. From a desktop machine wired into the same switch as the server I still can't do DAAP without iTunes randomly closing the connection in mid-stream, and from Sarah's laptop on the wireless LAN, she still can't do DAAP or reliable SMB file sharing (the connection keeps getting dropped). SMB seems OK from the desktop machine, however.
So I wondered if NetBSD's 802.1Q implementation might be the problem; since the old vr interface is built into the server's motherboard, I now have two NICs, so just put the server on both internal VLANs independently (with no 802.1Q). And it's no better.
I can imagine that iTunes might just be fussy about its DAAP implementation and not like something daapd (an open-source implementation of the DAAP music sharing in iTunes) is doing; but why should SMB also be unreliable? I tried SMB from my own laptop over the wifi link, and found it workable but oddly slow. I'm going to experiment further with connecting my laptop directly to the switch (on either wifi or internal VLAN) and seeing how it responds, I think... something's fishy!
Fri 19th Jan 2007 10:55 am 
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By Ben, Fri 19th Jan 2007 @ 11:10 am
What with NetBSD being a pale and twisted shadow of the one true UNIX clone and everything, it's probably a dodgy implementation.
I've always had problems with NetBSDs networking. When I say 'problems', I mean not working at all, even without any fancy stuff. And when I say 'always', I mean, 'tried once and gave up in disgust'.
By alaric, Fri 19th Jan 2007 @ 12:33 pm
That is indeed a fair trial 😉 Although Leo had some problems with NetBSD networking when running under VMware, too.
It's generally worked fine for me, bar this, and I have as yet no real idea if the problem lies with NetBSD, Mac OS X, or my skip-rescued reject switches!
I'm currently thinking:
The current version of DAAPD probably just doesn't work well with the current version of iTunes, since the problem seems to persist no matter how I rearrange the network topology.
The SMB problem may be something to do with the wifi LAN, since it works fine from the (wired) desktop machine. I want to do more experiments to try and narrow this down.
By Ben, Fri 19th Jan 2007 @ 1:30 pm
Oh, you're right. NetBSD is the problem. I'm just going to have to switch to a real OS.
Perhaps I'll give OS/2 a go. I've been meaning to take a look at it properly for years.
By andyjpb, Fri 19th Jan 2007 @ 6:08 pm
Have you tried flood pinging both hosts from each other with large packets? That way you should get full, back-to-back frames coming out of the interface.