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Need Help with D-link DI-524 and Setting up File Sharing

Good news to report, i got the network up and running about half an hour ago! I couldn't have done it without all of your valuable tips David (thanks also to Ryan & Joseph). I went through all of my settings on both computers and made a few minor changes and things were still not working. I turned off both firewalls and did the \\\\computer\\share\\ command and voila- the shared folders showed up on both computers. I never realized that files could be shared in both directions! I've taken up a lot of your time but I have a couple of more questions:

1) I only have a 6 Mbps transfer rate from my older Pentium 2 host to my Pentium 4 client, is this typical? I was hoping things would be much faster with 802.11g. The P4 to P2 computer transfer rate seems to be a lot faster in the opposite direction.

2) I understand that the router acts as a firewall. Do I still need to use a software firewall? Is there a way to configure software firewalls for my network to pass through while blocking out all of the nasties from the Internet? I have been unplugging my DSL modem while working on the network just to be safe.

Many thanks and God bless- I hope I can repay the favor sometime!

Harry

Reply to
Harry King
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OK, then something is limiting your transfer rate. From the specs on your card, the P2 can do 100baseT. It's a bit tricky to get Windoze to disclose the speed and mode (half or full duplex) but you can sorta tell by decoding the lights on the ethernet port and/or on the routers ethernet switch. Sometimes, the status page on the wireless router shows the connection speed. You can also fire up the Windoze Performance Monitor and check the scale on the network traffic. My guess(tm) is that if it's capeable of doing 100Mbit/sec, then it probably is doing 100Mbits/sec.

One interesting test would be to ignore the wireless (by disabling it) and just plug the P4 into the router with a CAT5 ethernet cable. I'm sure the P4 can do 100Mbit/sec sec. Then, try your transfer test. If it still shows 12Mbits/sec, then something is seriously broken, probably in the P2. If you're not sure, try it on a variety of machines, with and without wireless, and see if you can isolate the culprit. It might be helpful to find another fast P4 machine to temporarily replace the P2 and see if it magically fixes the problem.

I use IPerf for most of my benchmarking.

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I was amazed to discover that I was getting really bad performance results from a wireless benchmark which was just fine a few days before. Then, I remembered that I had switched virus scanners to Free AVG 7.1. The virus scanner was scanning the test file used to measure the performance and was causing the slowdown on both the sending and receiving machine. Oops.

Another interesting and simple test is to just ping one machine from the other via a wireless link using Windoze: ping -t other_machine_ip_address If the ping time in time=msec column varies radically or shows lost packets, you're getting some multipath or interference. It should be a fairly low number (2-3msec) be constant.

Yep. It can do 100Mbit/sec.

I'm not a big fan of the Realtek 8139 chipset, but it does work, is quite common, and should be more than adequate. You might want to dive into: Control Panel -> Network -> Realtek Right click on Realtek and select properties. Dive into the list of device properties and make sure that nobody has accidentally set the speed down to 10Mbits/sec. It should be "auto" or you can try to force it to 100baseT-FDX.

See:

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tweaks.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Hi Jeff- the Pentium 2 is wired, The P4 is wireless

I got the specs for my ethernet card for the wired part of the network

Test Configuration Product Name/Model/Rev Realtek RTL8139/810X Family Fast Ethernet/Rev.D Specification Version/Rev C HSM v1.11 Adapter Bus Type PCI Adapter Bus Width 32 Adapter Transfer Method Bus Mastering Communications Mode Half/Full Duplex Connector RJ-45 Error Capturing N/S Multicast Mode YES Promiscuous Mode YES Topology Ethernet Transmission Line Speed 10/100 Mbps

Is this an appropriate card for my network? Can any settings be tweaked to get a faster transfer rate?

Thanks, I will check this site out

Again, many thanks Jeff- this is a wealth of information and is greatly appreciated.

Reply to
Harry King

Glad you got it going.

Reply to
David Taylor

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