Well, I was planning this great big triumphant post about getting Fluffy up and running again, but then I ran into the suck that is linux/unix on cheap hardware.
The original plan was to install Solaris on my rig and play around with Sun’s neato ZFS. Unfortunately, Solaris had no driver support for either of my ethernet cards or my promise ATA133 cards. Doh.
So I figure, I’ll just fall back on Suse and try out the new version 10. For all intents and purposes, I really like it. Unfortunately its network performance, like last time, is pretty horrible with my hardware. Suse 10 can’t seem to manage more than 3MB/Sec on either of my gigabit ethernet cards, even when directly connected to my other machine. If I start more than one transfer, that will happily also do 3MB/Sec, and so on up until I’m getting roughly 20MB/sec out of the connection. Retarded. I’m not getting any errors, and I’ve completely killed the firewall just to be sure, but it looks like there’s some weird software or driver issue that I really just don’t care to track down.
Now that Fedora has XFS support, I think I might just end up heading down that road instead, hoping this isn’t a kernel 2.6 issue in general. Browsing through the SUSE forums reveals others seeing the same issues with no real resolutions that work.
I’m starting to remember why I gave up on this in the first place.