Cross-platform client backup speed problems (Windows server, Mac client)

[bspachman]

First, the obligatory system details & general speeds:

 

Network: SMC Barricade Router w/3*10/100BT Ethernet ports + 802.11b

 

Server--

Windows 2000 Professional SP4

Retrospect 6.5.350

10/100BT Ethernet NIC

Backing up to 250GB SATA hard drive

 

Local backups proceed at speeds of ~625 MB/min for the boot drive (IDE) to over 1800MB/min for the RAID subsystem on the machine. All great!

 

Client1--

Windows 2000 Professional SP4

Retrospect Client 6.5.136

10/100BT Ethernet NIC

 

This Windows client backup proceeds at speeds around 320MB/min. AFAIK, this is a normal, acceptable speed over a 100BT network.

 

Client2--

Macintosh PowerBook G3 (Lombard)

OSX 10.3.4

Retrospect Client 6.0.108

10/100BT Ethernet NIC

Skyline 802.11b card

 

This client backup is terrible. Generally speeds of around 2MB/min when connected with 100BT. The speed rockets up to 6MB/min when using the 802.11b card.

 

I did a bunch of searching in the knowledge base and here in the forums and found this problem is not unheard of. The KB solution (using Terminal & ifconfig) doesn't work on my machine, but I remembered that the Network control panel under 10.3 allows you to set the speed & duplexing of an Ethernet connection. I tried setting the speed of the wired Ethernet to 10BT and the speed of the backup jumped up to 20MB/min for a little while & has now settled down to 2.7MB/min.

 

What are my options?

 

Does anyone have any ideas about solving this problem?

 

Best,

Brad

[natew]

Hi

 

I share your pain. I too have a G3 Lombard that backs up slow as molasses. I have narrowed it down to a problem with the network drivers in OSX. I find the machine has trouble copying large files over SMB when the speed is at 100 Mb.

 

The network port settings for OSX don't seem to work for me. Neither does the cocktail utility. The only way I can get a remotely reasonable backup speed is to attach the powerbook to a 10Mb hub. I also have no problems copying files this way.

 

Sorry I don't have a resolution for you.

Nate