i-cubed EtherLan 600 / EtherH module
staf...@birksch.demon.co.uk
In an earlier article David Williams <da...@argonet.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <888980352.3644.0...@news.demon.co.uk>,
>staf...@birksch.demon.co.uk wrote:
>> A 25MHz A5000 tends to stall.... Access is the fastest user
>> protocol that I have used......APPFS is I think as good now provided
>> you enable the 'background' Start Econet TX commands rather than the
>> 'Do calls' (its not documented)...
>
>Can you expand on the AppFS setup Alan?
>
APPserver is started from its RUN file (which also contains all the
configuration parameters....no separate configuration utility on this
one!
There are two critical lines:
Appserver_SetUp -f ADFS -d 4 -n 200 -b 8192
AppServer_EconetSetUp -b 34 -s
The first is well documented - exporting a filing system ADFS in the above case - drive4
with 200 blocks each 8K in length acting as a cache withing RMA space (limited to 4M
in total even on 8MB RO3.1 machines.....but up to 10MB I thing on RO3.7.......of course
about 2MB goes with modules softloading.....
I would try to ensure that there is enough cache space for client machines to boot...start
up one client.....if the disc light flashes on the server when you start the second increase
the size of the cache. On most setups this is large enough to ensure that most applications
will cache as well.
The next line opens 34 receive blocks. In theory 2 blocks might be enough in that
when one is being dealt with the second block will fill with the next request....and
so on was it not for....
the -s command (undocumented?) which enables the application server to multitask can call
its transmit commands and proceeds to deal with other requests without waiting while the
transmit finishes. This instantly 'free's up the desktop on the server machine very
noticeably on later models but also brings benefits with 25MHz Arm3 A5000 stations.
ALthough this has always been possible with ANT Ethernet cards (In my experience) it has
only been reliable with I-cubed ethernet cards since EtherH4.16 (again.....in my experience)
(On the negative side we have a whole load of ANT cards - Ether3 and EtherB which
are really awful using Access via any of the repeaters we have on site...although
EtherM and Icubed cards have no problems.....)
We have 30 machines in one room and using 34 blocks guarantees that no machine is left out -
with retries attempting to get its request to the server (stil leaving some capacity
for other machines). With the -s flag you reduce to around 6 open blocks with little
attempt on load times - although in theory there might be some increase in collisions and
network load.
We only use our Main APPFS server for a minimal boot now - transfering control as quickly
as possible to Omniclient (still not available in ROM despite all the hype over recent years)
and therefore onto our NTserver (running with Fast Ethernet at 100MHz feeding many separate
10MHz links via a switching hub). I remain EXTREMELY impressed that the NT server
can seemingly take everything we throw at it (Dual PPro 200MHz, 128M RAM) without
so much as flinching.......apart from some ocassional irritating timeout errors on client
stations...which don't appear entirely load related.
--
Alan Davies
Head of Computing
Birkenhead School