SRFERGU@ERENJ.BITNET (Scott Ferguson) (04/11/90)
Pardon my naivete about the low-levels of TCP and Ethernet. I asked these same questions long ago, and I was answered with that famous deafening silence that we're all accustomed to from time to time. Thanks for setting me straight on all the details. Now... How can a person like me with all those problems in my Ethernet cards, drivers, and end-user software make the best of it? I've gotta move 200 Megabytes at a time across this skinny little wire full of problems, and I'm tired of doing it at rates similar to a really fast kermit. I'd like to do a hyperchannel, but there's no standards there and no support (read affordable) from anyone for that. Next, I figured fddi is supposed to be out real soon, but if the software has that much room for improvement, a factor of ten in bit rate is diddly in terms of throughput. Granted, it seems I can probably benefit greatly by going to sr10, and it looks like I'm finally going to be able to join the club. The drawback there is that these 200 MBytes of data have to go somehwere on my 348 MByte disks, and if the OS is going to eat over a hundred of them, it's going to be a real problem. Of course, we've had this discussion before. I don't suppose there's a way that's simple to bypass all the protocol layers and just get to the wire without interruptions, eh? Wishfully yours, Scott Ferguson srfergu@erenj.bitnet