Sorry about interrupting you, Ben, during your kernel hacking
session at the meeting.  Isn't this illegal?  Hacking the
kernel in a public place?  First he shows us this neat
/dev/config.tgz patch, then shows off his T3 connection
speed at the U and downloads 2.4.19 in .01 seconds, geez.
Some people have all the fun.

So after seeing this showmanship(kinda like a kid
and a fast car) I shouted out that I can't get a 200 MB
file from box A to box B ten feet away in less than
5 minutes.  Thats with 100MB ethernet.

Anyways, after making myself sound like a complete idiot,
(and thankfully Ben diverted attention away from me)
I went home bound and determined to figure out what was
wrong.

It turns out that one of my boxes is dropping ethernet
packets, ifconfig showed them plain as the nose
on my face.

So the next question is "why was NFS so darn slow, yet
a TCP throughput test showed good results?".  Also scp
could transfer files much faster.

Turns out NFS uses UDP instead of TCP, and has a
slow default retry timeout.  Add to mount -otimeo=1 helped
a lot.  I really need to swap out the bad NIC card(8139too.o)
as the proper fix.

So why did they implement NFS using UDP?  This just seems
goofy to me.  Theres an option to run NFS on TCP,
but it's not the default.

I was putting up with this for way too long, mostly because
I reached my limit on hassles to contend with.  "I don't
want to debug this now, all I want to do is get this lousy
video file from box A to box B ten feet away."
So I used scp, although that seems stupid in the privacy of your
own basement.  but what else is there?  ftp, http? Those
seem stupid too.  Rsync?  That sounds good "BZZZZ" you
lose, can't do rsync(without -e ssh, or setting up a rsync
server) with a few stock RH boxes.

To further punish myself, I figure I'd get rsync working.
This meant getting rsh, rlogin working, which I've never
setup.  This sure was a pain, man pages for rcp, rlogin
don't tell you how to set it up.  My two books "redhat 6
unleashed" and "Unix complete" failed me miserably.
Thank god for the internet where I found instructions
on how to setup ~/.rhosts and /etc/hosts.equiv.  And a few
hours later, after figuring out the permissions on these
config files had to be set just right, it was working!

I just love how the man page for rlogin says:
"Rlogin will be replaced by telnet in the near future".
Who's the maintainer of rlogin, I want to complain about
the doc, and ask for my money back.

I'll try out this netcat thing soon, as it sounds like
a hip tool.