From: dseeman@novell.com (Daniel Seeman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Subject: Re: Mac freezeups while on Novell server
Date: 29 Dec 92 17:33:58 GMT
Organization: Novell Inc., San Jose, Califonia

In article <1992Dec29.161544.25890@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> fod@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov (Frank O'Donnell) writes:
>We have a group of Macs in another building at our site
>that log on daily to our office's Novell server.  The
>Macs are in another Appletalk zone and on a different
>subnet on the other side of a couple of routers on our
>site-wide network.
>
>At first things seemed to be running pretty well, but
>during the last few weeks the Mac users have reported
>serious problems with slowdowns and cursor freezing.
>Typically what happens is they will be typing in Word or
>QuarkXPress and the cursor will freeze for 5 to 15
>seconds.  Eventually it comes back, but sometimes some
>of the text is lost, particularly if the user was a
>fast typist.  This has been happening lately once every
>minute or so, so the problem is more than a minor
>annoyance to the users.  Occasionally there are other
>problems, such as mysteriously being logged off the
>server.
>
>We ran a few tests to try to isolate the problem --
>removing cc:Mail's ccNotify init, for example.
>We finally determined that the problem appeared when
>the user was logged into our Novell server.  If they
>dragged the server volume into the trash, the problem
>disappeared.
>
>I gather from reading other messages here that the
>answer might be "You have too much traffic on your WAN."
>However, I'm still trying to determine what can be done
>about it.
>
>For the time being users have adopted the workaround of
>only logging on when they need to, but since these
>folks are heavy server users this means logging on and
>off perhaps 20+ times a day.  Would establishing some
>kind of tunneling to route traffic probably help?  Is
>this an inevitability of the way Macs talk to servers,
>or is there hope in sight for a less delicate protocol
>in the future?
>
>Thanks for any suggestions,
>
>Frank
>frank@jplpost.jpl.nasa.gov

Hi,

If this performance problem is getting steadily worse and you are not adding
steadily more traffic to your WAN, then I would say traffic is not the problem.
Two possibilities come to mind immediately.

First, you may have an intermittent problem on the LAN NIC that supports your
Macintosh clients.  Now, since IPX is quite a bit less "chatty" on the net, DOS
workstations would not necessarily be so sensative to a poorly functioning LAN
NIC.  So, you might try swapping LAN NICs in the server to see if that takes 
care of the problem.

NetWare for Macintos v3.0 was shipped with a NOTIFY init (v2.1---I think) and 
this utility was associated with very poor performance on the Macintosh when
logged into the NetWare server.  If NOTIFY is installed on the Macintosh, try
removing it to see if your performance gets better.  If it does, you need to 
upgrade NOTIFY to v2.11.  This version is available on NETWIRE under NOVLIB8.
I believe the file name is something like NOTIFY.SIT.  Just to be safe, download
this "Stuffed" file to your Macintosh and UNSTUFFIT there.

Let me know if neither of these suggestions provide you with a solution, and I 
will think of something else.  In this event, it would help to have a complete
network map.

Think Peace...

Dan Seeman
Novell
Walnut Creek,Ca.

ps.  Let us not consider some of the more detailed solutions like IP tunneling
for now as I do not think your transport protocol is the problem source at this
point.
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