From: hz01930@hx.deere.com (Jay D. Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans.ethernet
Subject: TCP/IP and Netware coexistence (Was: 802.3 Non-Compliance (?))
Date: 1 Sep 92 12:53:34 GMT

seifert@netcom.com (Rich Seifert) writes:

>In article <1992Aug28.194558.4752@iplmail.orl.mmc.com>, more@tcc.orl.mmc.com () writes:
>> In this meeting (which unfortunately I wasn't in), the vendor made the statement
>> that Netware Servers violate the 802.3. His statement was that when a netware
>> server detects a collision, that rather than following the random backoff, 
>> in the Ethernet world, the Netware server immediately attempts to retransmit
>> the collided packet(after sending the jam sequence). This vendor stated that
>> because of this, TCP/IP based systems running on the same ethernet as Novell
>> netware servers could experience some performance problems due to the 
>> noncompliant nature of the netware server. He further stated that for this
>> reason, NASA has put a ban on Novell Netware at it's sites. 
>>

>I agree with you, this is a lot of BS. A NetWare server uses the same
>controller hardware as anyone else; Novell has long been out of the
>NIC business. The backoff algorithm is implemented in the silicon on the
>NIC, and there is very little that NetWare can do about it.

>Now, it is true that older releases of NetWare used the 802.3 MAC
>without using the 802.2 Logical Link Control. This "strictly"
>violates the 802 specifications, but has nothing at all to do with
>hogging the wire through manipulation of the backoff algorithm.

>In any case, current releases of NetWare (2.2, 3.11, etc.) fully
>support 802.2.
> 
>-- 
>Rich Seifert                    Networks and Communications Consulting
>seifert@netcom.com              (408) 996-0922
>                                (408) 996-2860 FAX
>"... specialists in Local Area Networks and Data Communications systems"

I understand from this and other posts in this thread that retransmit
backoffs are hardware functions.  Good.  When setting up the 
parameters for NetWare, don't you have a choice of using 802.3 compliance
*or* Ethernet II?  We are using a Vax Netware server which requires
Ethernet II to be the parameter setting, and we have experienced
difficulties with PCs using 3C503 ethernet controllers to talk TCP/IP.
The PCs frequently would not see reply packets, and keyboard input
using telnet would be "sticky," you may type for a while with nothing
echoing on the screen, then after a second or two, the characters would
appear.  Additionally, we have long had a strange behavior on our Sun
workstations where we would get "NFS server not responding" messages
occasionally.  Looking back at that problem, it only occurs on segments
of the network not protected from Netware traffic by a bridge or router.
We finally placed the segment with the PCs on the other side of a bridge
to get away from the Netware traffic with resulting perfect performance.

Our overall network traffic is in the neighborhood of 7%.  Are these
symptoms of using Netware with the Ethernet II setting, or would I see
the same thing with Netware using 802.3 compliance?

Thanks for your input.



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Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans.ethernet