Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Intermittent slow response
Date: 20 Jun 2002 09:11:46 -0700

I spent considerable time tracking down a "slow reponse" problem.  I
administer two Ultra 2's and a Ultra 5 on one linkswitch (on the same
subnet), connected to a large intranet.  I was experiencing some awful
delays in processing on one Ultra 2 even though the perfmeters showed
little activity.

After much testing, I finally found that the command
	netstat -i -I hme0 5
where the 5 means print a line every 5 seconds, was showing lots of
output errors and collisions whenever I tried to send a file from that
host to one of the other ones on the same subnet.  One puzzling thing
about it was that both Ultra 2's showed this pattern when sending a
file, but the Ultra 5 only showed collisions - not output errors (and
not the awful delays).  All three systems are on Solaris 8, (2/02).  I
think there may be a bug in the motherboard ethernet card on Ultra 2's
- maybe there is a patch for that.

The solution:  

I used 
	ndd -get /dev/hme link_speed
and
	ndd -get /dev/hme link_mode
to discover that I was running 100Mbs, half-duplex, on all three
Ultra's, even though the link switch was capable of full-duplex. 
Apparently the autonegotiation software is not working properly.  In
the 				/etc/init.d/inetsvc
script I added a test to find out the speed/mode, and force it to go
to full-duplex, high-speed if it were not there already.  IIRC, the
commands to force it were:
	ndd -set /dev/hme adv_100T4_cap 0
	ndd -set /dev/hme adv_autoneg_cap 0
	ndd -set /dev/hme adv_100fdx_cap 1
	ndd -set /dev/hme adv_10fdx_cap 0
	ndd -set /dev/hme adv_100hdx_cap 0
	ndd -set /dev/hme adv_10hdx_cap 0
I did this on all three hosts and rebooted each one.  Once this was
done, the collisions and the output errors all disappeared, and also
there were no more long delays.

However, now that I have read the docs at 

Solaris 8 2/02 on Sun Hardware Collection >> Platform Notes: The hme
FastEthernet Device Driver >> 4. Setting Parameters >> Setting
Parameters in
the /etc/system File

I see the better way to do it is in the /etc/system file.  Oh well,
live and learn.  At least I accomplished the same thing this way.

Hope this helps another admin person.

Boyd