Recommended gigabit pci NIC's and switches

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Taisto Repo wrote:

> Can someone recommend a working combination of gigabit PCI nic for  
> clients and a gigabit switch between the server and client network?

Moreorless any combination should work fine -- presuming there are
reasonable linux drivers for the GigE network card (which there usually
are).  

> The clients are working otherwise OK but youtube videos are like  
> slide shows... Currently there is a 100 Mbit switch / network cards  
> on clients but probably a faster interface would help at least a  
> little bit. 

I'd be quite surprised if this was down to lack of network bandwidth.  I've
watched full-screen video with sound over 100Mbit/sec with almost no frame
skipping.  It's possible you have lots of clients in action and the sum of
them is saturating your bandwidth but if that's the case you would expect
to see all sorts of things slowing down, not just youtube videos. 

My gut reaction would be to ask what spec the thin client is.  It's
possible the load of ssh decryption of the rendered video is causing a
problem.  Also, if you login to the thin client on the text terminal, have
a look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf and check the video card.  This bit tells you
what video card driver is being used.  If it's using vesa (as mine is
below), you might be able to improve on that by picking a more suitable
driver and setting it in /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI Technologies, Inc. ATI Default Card"
        Driver          "vesa"
        BusID           "PCI:3:0:0"
EndSection

If you need help checking the above, I can elaborate further on how to
login to the thin client text terminal.

Do I presume you can watch the youtube videos on the server without
problems?  If you have several thin clients, do some work better than
others -- if so, what's the difference between them?

If you want to look at the bandwidth usage on the server, you could install
a tool like iftop (which is in the universe repository) and watch it's
output as you watch the youtube stuff.  This should give you a rough idea
of bandwidth usage.

> However it is not worth of upgrade if there is no speed gain. Has  
> anyone got experiences of these?

I'd say it's fairly doubtful this will help.

Gavin