Transfer Speeds and 'Win 98'

[Keith.]

Hopefully this might be of some use to someone.

I arrived at this list this morning, looking for info about problems with
windows 98 talking to samba 2.0.7 on linux.
i was dismayed to find that very few people were talking about problems, as
i had been asked to diagnose this problem:

a bunch of machines, which used to run 'win 95' without problem, have now
been 'upgraded' to '98'.
the result was that samba reads were fine but writes were very slow or would
stop with "network resource no longer available"
how could it be that i have this problem and people on the list are saying
it works fine with 98??

so, i hacked around all day and looked on this list, saw that some folks
were experiencing some similar nastiness,
some stuff about old 3com cards...

i checked ftp transfers, - fine.
i turned up the log level and looked at that, yeah....
i was confused, some of the machines were working OK, i started wondering
about tcp/ip versions, maybe 95 systems files got back in there?
then i noticed that smb over tcp/ip to a windows95 machine was misbehaving
also. (netbeui installed also, but tcp/ip set to default)

anyway, to cut a long story (day) short, i noticed that the network driver
was listed in device manager as
"Realtek RTL8029 Ethernet Adapter and Compatibles"

now, i remembered that these machines were fitted out with some cheap
"Genius" cards. and that i had installed "Genius" drivers from floppies
before.

so, i replaced win 98's driver with the genius one, and hey presto, smb over
tcp/ip starts working normally again for writes to a share. I didn't even
need to restart the machine (for a change.)

or at least it seems that way at the end of a looooooonnnnnnnnnnggggggg
annoying day.

i'll try the other offending machines tomorrow...

oh, how i hate this 'win98 upgrade' what a lot of grief. thanks ms for
making it pretty incompatible with 95 on the same network!

sorry about the dreadful writing style.

K.