Subway Poseidon USB to LAN adapter tests

[mikep]

Hi

With my A1200 Subway clockport USB controller
i recently tested two different USB to LAN adapter.
One is levelone 10/100, the other is Eyetech/Noname 10/100,
both have Pegasus/Pegasus II chipsets.

What really does surprise me, was the extreme slow transfer
rates of these adapters. Both had a transferrate of about
4 to 5 kilobytes/sec .
Is this normal for usb to lan adapters on A1200 subway controller card ?
All tests were made both with AmiTCP4 and MiamiDX.
System is OS3.9, BPPC 603e/210-060/50, BVPPC.

Hope someone does have some hints for me to that subject.

[mikep]

Hi, crumb

Indeed, that was one of my first thoughts. But my network
is a 10/100mbit autosensing, fullduplex one, USB_to_LAN COntroller have been configured via Trident in various ways (first AUTONEGOTIATE, then preset with 100Mb FD, then 10Mb FD, the 100Mb HD, then 10Mb HD).
But nothing led to a higher transfer rate, always about 4 to 5 KB/s - curious .

[mikep]

Yesterday evening i did some further testing.
First, tried both LAN adapter with windowsxp -> adapter are ok, transferrates are normal (very high) -> this means the adapter hardware has no defect.

Second, connecting a USB memory stick to the Subway gives a transfer rate of about 410 KB/s, so the clockport itsself is not the bottleneck.

Third, tried PCMCIA-Card 3c589 network with MiamiDX and AmiTCP. All ok, which means TCP/IP-stack is ok, transferrate was about 320 KB/s .

So, perhaps a software problem with the usbpegasus.device ?

Any hints in what i can do to solve this problem are highly welcome .

[mikep]

cmon, no one here who can help, or had the same problem and possibly solved it ??
or give some advice with which tools i can inspect,debug,monitor the network, the usbdevice, ... in order to get hints about the problem ?

Any help would greatly be appreciated

[mikep]

sadly i cant test it under MorphOS, because i dont have a MOS installation on my machine, hmmm - i think, should be worth giving it a try. Will report what happens as soon as i get familiar with MOS (never did use it up to now).

Disable WarpOS - ok, will do a test drive and report the results

Thanks

[mikep]

Now i did some further testing:

WarpOS has been completely deinstalled/disabled, so i have now a native 68K environment, but the effects are the same - very low transfer rates.
I monitored the transfer between Amiga and PC by just inspecting the NET LED indicator. Its curious, but as soon as AmiFTP got connected to PC (i do see the welcome message from ftp-server), AmiFTP needs really lot of time to PWD, LIST, CWD into the ftpserver. It really, really takes a very long time to get the filelist (COMMAND ls or LIST).
The NET LED indicator on my USB-LAN adapter shows a strange behaviour - just before a download gets startet (but slow), Amiga tries for about one minute to contact ftp-server, i can see the LED flashing really often (about 50 times) but nothing happens, no answer from PC, then suddenly transfer starts, but very slow.

Sadly, i cant test it with MOS, because the downloadable PoseidonMOS Package from www.platon42.de does not contain the class drivers for USB-LAN adapter.

[mikep]

ok, seems to me, that i have to go into deep discovery now, will do ping tests and monitoring tests and report it back later.

BTW:
the poseidon guide tells something about connection timeouts and/or dead device in case someone has no valid license
i bougth my Subway from Vesalia, i am using poseidon v3.6 and Trident tells me that i have a OEM license for Subway controller. Also Trident prefs sometimes tells me in its window: "PoPo kicks ass" - whats this ?
Do i have a correct license ?

[mikep]

Logging is completely disabled, no log files at all. dont know whether it interferes with other hardware - how can i test this ?
I only have Subway card on my clockport (its an A1200). Its not the only device on Subway, my Mouse is in port 2, network adapter is on port 1 of Subway controller.
By way of trial i should remove the mouse and see what happens ?

[mikep]

Now, things are getting a bit clearer now.

I did some testing with Miamiping with options -f (ping flood) and varying packet sizes. Following some stats:
Paket      Transfer     Packet
size         rate       loss
(bytes)      (KB)        (%)
 128          37           0
 512         104           0
1024         166           0
1200         175           0
1400         198           0
1472         203           0
>1472         6          100

So, as soon as packet sizes is greater than 1472, transfer rate drops to about 6KB/s and packet loss rate is 100 %.
What does this mean in terms of my FTP-Transferrate problem.

Some further tests. I did install Samba, called smbclient, connected to the PC, then with the get command i retrieved a big file (20MB of size). PacketMonitor tells that transferrate is now about 220 KB/sec, thats really good.

But as soon as i try to connect to my PC with FTP, transfer rate drops down that bad. If i use the same FTP-Client with my PCMCIA-Network-Card, then all is ok and transferrate is about 310KB/sec - only with Subway-Card rate drops down.
Does Subway-Stack have a problem with packetsize of 1500 ?

[mikep]

Hmmm - ok, that would be a solution, but not very user friendly. And - as i said in the other posts, as soon as i use
 (on amiga side) my PCMCIA Network card, with all other parts left the same (MiamiDX Stack, ATC) it does work perfectly, the only part thats got exchanged is the hardware device (USB Subway).
So why should i change max packet size on PC side. ok - if i can find out how to to that, i will give it a try.

Further notes.
Within MiamiDX config, i can query the Sana-II Parameters from usbpegasus.device, it gives me a MTU of 1500. I just tested to change this value to 1400 and save configuration, then restarted all - but doesnt help, same effect as before.
I dont think that subway card gets informed about changed MTU value. Is it allowed at all to change this parameter ?

[mikep]

Ok - then this evening i will try this out and report back if it suceeded.
BTW:
how gets subway, miami, USB-Lan-adapter the info about changed MTU value on - lets say - the router ? sorry, im not so deeply familiar on low level network protocols.

But the best place to change this in a transparent way, should be on Amigaside in setting the SANA parameter for the device - and as i said i presume that the USB-LAN-adapter doesnt get informed about the changed MTU-value (how can i test this ?)

[mikep]

Ok - now changed MTU values (router, and amiga) - but no effect, always get extreme slow transfer rate with ftp.
BTW, setting MTU via MiamiDX SANA-II parameter settings page does in fact work. Calling MiamiNetStat tells me the actual values for MTU for each device.

Inspecting the data transfer with MiamiTCPDump also gave no insight. No package losses are reported, instead during ftp data transmission only about 4 packets/sec are sent from amiga to pc and back.
Why so less ? I think someone is delaying packet transfer.

To Summarize all of that.
- Using USB-LAN adapter work with samba, there i get over 200 KB/sec
- Using it with FTP doesn not work, transfer rate is about 5 KB/sec
- Setting MTU values does work, but has no effect on bad FTP-Transfer rates
- Using FTP, Samba, Telnet with my TCP/IP-Stack but with 3com PCMCIA-Card does work great, about 300 KB/sec and more

So, what else can i check now to get USB-LAN-Adapter to work properly ?

[mikep]

I tried various ftp clients:
- AmiTradeCenter
- AmFTP
- AmiFTP
- SimpleFTP
- mFTP
- MiamiFTP
but whichever i use, the effect is always the same.

I did some more tests. i said, with samba using smbclient and the builtin get command i get over 200 KB/sec. Yesterday i installed smbfs/smb-handler, and what shall i say. Using smbfs/smb-handler gives me suddenly the same bad transferrates than ftp. This is really curious.

Greetings,Mike

[mikep]

Hi

That sounds quite good, can you send me the update. Will test it and report back, if my problems are gone or not.