EAZIX

EAZIX: Montavista & network configurations

I started the day looking for a monitor that nobody's using. Luckily, one of
the employees there found one for me. The one who's using it didn't go to
work, so i would have the same problem tomorrow, but that doesn't stop me
from doing my work today. They didn't have a MontaVista Linux installer, so
i had to copy a working installation from another disk, and there is one i
know, it's being used by the other trainees. They let me borrow their
harddisk for almost an hour to "tar" (make a single-file archive copy of)
their MontaVista filesystem. I used tar because it will have more
consistent result than a "cp" (UNIX command for copy), and will surely be
faster than a "cp -a" (archive copy to disk).
After that, i configured both Redhat and MontaVista to work on their local
network. They have setup their computers to have static IP addresses, that
is, they don't have DHCP (something that assigns IP adds dynamically), so i
had to configure the one i'm using with a static IP under their subnet.
They have a netmask of 192.168.63.255, that means that i can get any
address that starts with 192.168.63. and ends with a number from 1 to 254.
They're network gateway is at 192.168.63.254, so that takes it off the
list, since i can't use an ip address that's used by someone else. Asking
around, and trying out several addresses, i finally got 192.168.63.126,
which was the next available ip from the other trainees' sub-subnet
(192.168.63.125).
Having connected to their network, and by extension, the internet, i
downloaded two programs which they suggested to use for stress testing and
installed them in both systems.
After installing, and pinging a few more addresses, i requested for another
unit that i'll use for the testing. They didn't have an extra unit with a
network card (RJ45 socket), but the other students were finished testing
with multiple computers and were just documenting their work, so they lend
me a laptop that has 2 Redhat 7.3 systems, and a Windows XP system. Someone
also provided me a crossover UTP cable, so i connected the two units i have
for peer-to-peer testing.
The two units didn't recognized each other at first, because they're using
different netmasks. Changing the laptop's ip address to 192.168.63.127 and
its netmask to 192.168.63.255, they recognized each other (verified by
ping).
I didn't have time to do a thorough testing, but i've verified that some ftp
transfers were indeed slow. One of the employees suggested patching up the
driver with the one that Realtek supplied on their site, but this is both
tedious and drastic, and requested to make other tests on it to make sure
that the current driver is really the problem.
As there is a time to be there, so there is a time to go, so i took down
notes on what to do, poweroff'd my machines, and left the job for the
morrow.