Adding a switch to my network

[Praetor]

I decided to add a D-Link DGS-2205 Gig switch to my network. My setup now looks like Modem -> Wireless Router -> Switch.

Connected to the switch, I have my server running Gentoo Linux on an Intel board using the on-board Gigabit Ethernet Controller. I'm using the e1000 driver builtin to the kernel. On the other desktop, I installed a USR-7902a gig card, and am using the r8169 module compiled into the kernel.

Speeds have improved to 15-19Mb/s between the two big machines. I was expecting higher speeds out of my XPS2 laptop, but the 5400rpm harddrive is the bottleneck. uploads are good, downloads not-so-much.

My question is the connection between 10/100 router to the 10/100/1000 switch. I'm using a regular crossover cable to connect the two. Is this the correct way to do it? Or should I use a straight through cable? The pathetic manual was rather vague on this topic. I'm using the router to assign static IPs. Will I see better performance using one or the other?

 

[JackMDS]

If it is not the correct cable, it will not work at all.

However, I would not be surprise that your switch probably have MDX ports. In such a case it does not matter what type of cable is used, the ports adapt automatically.

As for speed, Peer to Peer Giga Home Networks (Current State at mid 2004).

:sun:

 

[bwatson283]

Originally posted by: Praetor
I decided to add a D-Link DGS-2205 Gig switch to my network. My setup now looks like Modem -> Wireless Router -> Switch.

Connected to the switch, I have my server running Gentoo Linux on an Intel board using the on-board Gigabit Ethernet Controller. I'm using the e1000 driver builtin to the kernel. On the other desktop, I installed a USR-7902a gig card, and am using the r8169 module compiled into the kernel.

Speeds have improved to 15-19Mb/s between the two big machines. I was expecting higher speeds out of my XPS2 laptop, but the 5400rpm harddrive is the bottleneck. uploads are good, downloads not-so-much.

My question is the connection between 10/100 router to the 10/100/1000 switch. I'm using a regular crossover cable to connect the two. Is this the correct way to do it? Or should I use a straight through cable? The pathetic manual was rather vague on this topic. I'm using the router to assign static IPs. Will I see better performance using one or the other?

mine is the same way.

 

[Praetor]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
If it is not the correct cable, it will not work at all.

However, I would not be surprise that your switch probably have MDX ports. In such a case it does not matter what type of cable is used, the ports adapt automatically.

As for speed, Peer to Peer Giga Home Networks (Current State at mid 2004).

:sun:

Awesome. I googled ezlan went looking for that page when I was originally setting it up. 😛

The router does advertise "Cable Recognition for Straight-through or Crossover Cables" but I was more curious about performance of one or the other.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Praetor
My question is the connection between 10/100 router to the 10/100/1000 switch. I'm using a regular crossover cable to connect the two. Is this the correct way to do it? Or should I use a straight through cable? The pathetic manual was rather vague on this topic. I'm using the router to assign static IPs. Will I see better performance using one or the other?

No, the router should play little to no part in the transfer performance between two computers connected to the switch. Besides, you're probably bottlenecked by the HD's heavily, and any tweaking of the networking layer at this point once you've set up GbE is going to make little difference.

To see that, you could measure the networking part by itself without the drive subsystems. E.g. using iperf.

Receiver: iperf -s
Sender: iperf -c receiver -l 60000 -t 21 -i 3 -r

BTW 15-19 MB/s for large files is OK for lower-end performance drives, and actually better than most cheap consumer NAS boxes regardless of their drives / RAID. IMO 30 MB/s is a reasonable lower-end target for an average reasonably modern computer. 50-60 MB/s and higher can be achieved with fast drives / outer sectors / decent RAID setups over decent GbE for large files.

Also, PCI NICs IME get some performance benefit from jumbo frames. The Realtek should be able to do 7K frames. Part of the reason for this post is that I'd be interested in knowing high-end JF performance of the D-Link switch; I've had JF performance problems with an older one of theirs.

But again, you're probably doing fine for your hardware, and tweaking the network is not going to do anything when you're limited by the HDs.

 

[ktwebb]

There is no performance variant on straight through or X-over.