[buug] connectivity issues w/ NT and FreeBSD running at same time

[Brian Sobolak]

Hi -

I'm experiencing a number of issues when I try to run my WinNT machine and
my FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE box at the same time.

Here's my network setup:

DSL Modem
DLink Wireless Router - 192.168.0.1 (default gw)
192.168.0.2 - DLink DWL G810 Wireless Bridge (192.168.0.2)
192.168.0.4 - FreeBSD 4.9 -STABLE
192.168.0.6 - WinNT4

The BSD box and the NT box are connected to a Netgear FS105 switch. So is
the bridge.  The NT machine has an older bus and runs at 10Mbs-half duplex
(it has to - it's an ISA card). The bridge and the BSD box run at
100Mbs-full duplex.

If I run the Windows machine OR the BSD machine, it works fine.  If I run
them both at the same time I start to get connectivity issues.  I get lots
of timeouts when browsing the Internet with some occasional successes,
but not many.

When I ping Nt (.6) -> BSD (.4) it works fine.  Same with reverse.
When I ping NT or BSD -> wireless bridge (.2), it works fine.  Once every,
say, two minutes one ping is dropped and next takes 3 secs to resolve, but
it otherwise works fine.

It's when I ping from NT or BSD (with both running) to the default gateway
then I get tons of drops.  Barely anything gets through, and when I've
left it running I lose lots of packets - over 70%.

Since the problem seems to be running both machines at the same time, I
suspect there's a problem with the duplexing?  I've tried modifying
rc.conf to automatically go half-duplex at startup and it caused the
interface to not work at all.  Even though the 100 full-duplex was
auto-sensed, I couldn't actually send any packets over the interface.  It
kept coming back with "no route to host".

Help, please?!?

My best guess is that there's an issue somewhere with the duplexing since
it only seems to happen when both machines are running.  (I'm assuming a
wireless bridge should be able to handle traffic from two machines at once
- a false assumption?)

Any recommendations?

thanks,

brian