Crazy Network Problems

[leehill]

Hi,

Ive connected two pc's with the following setup

Abit KD7 Raid
Ath 2200+ XP
128mb Geforce 4 4200Ti
PCline 10/100 ethernet adapter x 2
via onboard via 6102 rhine11 ethernet


Abit KD7 Raid
Ath 2200+ XP
128mb Geforce 4 4200Ti
us robotics 10/00 pci nix tx
via onboard via 6102 rhine11 ethernet

both machines can access the internet individually using the via onboard ethernet cards, but they cannot connect to each other using them, after much swapping about of the connections I finally managed to connect one pc to the internet using the via onboard card as the host and connect the client to it using the 1 of the other cards.

all has been fine until today when the client machine lost all network connections, so i restarted both machines and still no luck after much swapping about i ended up back at the same connection setup, which then worked again, but internet browsing on the client was painfully slow and file transfer from client to host or vice versa was impossible, then switched cable round again and all was ok (120mb file from client to host in about 2mins). I then restarted client machine and all networing was lost again.arghhhhhhh

I have now managed to get all working again with fast browsing but network file speeds are fairly slow again (2mb file in about 2 mins).

there seems to be no logic to the problem, one minute working then not then slow transfers then ok again.

sorry for the long explanation but it was needed

cheers for any help

[drow_elf]

what os?
and are your cables/nics known good? or can you test them

[leehill]

both machines are xp, cables are fine and both nics are decent standard

[loop]

are using a crossover cable to connect the 2 PCs together?
As in a cable that is designed to connect 2 PCs directly. Most networking cables are designed to plug into a hub or other such device and are wired differently to a crossover cable.

[leehill]

Yeah cables are all correct as mentioned above the setup has worked and it is now working again (just started working last night) but I know that should I restart I will lose all networking again.

what type of transfer speeds should I be getting from pc to pc at the moment when I click on the network connections it is painfully slow accessing any files on the host machine (1min to navigate through folders) and copying a 2mb file takes about 5 mins.

could it be due to the fact that I have 3 network cards installed on the client machine? there are no conflicts that i can see

[loop]

transfer speeds should be very fast. I dont use a crossover but assuming your cards are both 100mbit cards you should get about 8mbit per second (its what I get through 2 switches using ftp). So maybe yours might be a bit faster. But even with those transfer speeds browsing files on other machines takes ages anyway.