hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick) (04/27/86)
It's a bit unusual to have any significant CRC errors on an Ethernet. You might want to look at collision rates (given by netstat), as that will tell you if your network is approaching saturation. (Should be at most a few percent.) However it is probably better if you have serious monitoring tools such as the various Ethernet tools present in Sun's release 3.0. Also watch the performance of your gateways. Normally these are the bottlenecks in the system, and many TCP implementations can't deal well with slow gateways. I don't know any of the machines you are using, so I can't comment on them. But I can say that we have had to do serious work on some TCP's to get them to handle slow gateways. Beware that repeaters and Vitalink things give you a single logical Ethernet. Protocol incompatibilities or a program that has a bug that causes it to generate lots of broadcasts can bring down the whole network. I strongly suggest using real IP gateways at a number of places in your network, just to provide isolation. Particularly use them between parts of the network under different management, and between student and research parts. Having a repeater or protocol-independent gateway connecting you to a network over which you have no control is asking for trouble.