Sorry about interrupting you, Ben, during your kernel hacking session at the meeting. Isn't this illegal? Hacking the kernel in a public place? First he shows us this neat /dev/config.tgz patch, then shows off his T3 connection speed at the U and downloads 2.4.19 in .01 seconds, geez. Some people have all the fun. So after seeing this showmanship(kinda like a kid and a fast car) I shouted out that I can't get a 200 MB file from box A to box B ten feet away in less than 5 minutes. Thats with 100MB ethernet. Anyways, after making myself sound like a complete idiot, (and thankfully Ben diverted attention away from me) I went home bound and determined to figure out what was wrong. It turns out that one of my boxes is dropping ethernet packets, ifconfig showed them plain as the nose on my face. So the next question is "why was NFS so darn slow, yet a TCP throughput test showed good results?". Also scp could transfer files much faster. Turns out NFS uses UDP instead of TCP, and has a slow default retry timeout. Add to mount -otimeo=1 helped a lot. I really need to swap out the bad NIC card(8139too.o) as the proper fix. So why did they implement NFS using UDP? This just seems goofy to me. Theres an option to run NFS on TCP, but it's not the default. I was putting up with this for way too long, mostly because I reached my limit on hassles to contend with. "I don't want to debug this now, all I want to do is get this lousy video file from box A to box B ten feet away." So I used scp, although that seems stupid in the privacy of your own basement. but what else is there? ftp, http? Those seem stupid too. Rsync? That sounds good "BZZZZ" you lose, can't do rsync(without -e ssh, or setting up a rsync server) with a few stock RH boxes. To further punish myself, I figure I'd get rsync working. This meant getting rsh, rlogin working, which I've never setup. This sure was a pain, man pages for rcp, rlogin don't tell you how to set it up. My two books "redhat 6 unleashed" and "Unix complete" failed me miserably. Thank god for the internet where I found instructions on how to setup ~/.rhosts and /etc/hosts.equiv. And a few hours later, after figuring out the permissions on these config files had to be set just right, it was working! I just love how the man page for rlogin says: "Rlogin will be replaced by telnet in the near future". Who's the maintainer of rlogin, I want to complain about the doc, and ask for my money back. I'll try out this netcat thing soon, as it sounds like a hip tool.