Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

> > That was using the send/receive scripts.  They will also
> > work via ppp.
>
> I was able to use these, slowly.

I have a serial connection set up between Bl3 on a pentium desktop and Bl3 
on a 386 SX20 with 387, and 5MB RAM.  To test it I used send/receive to 
send the kermit binary, about 2MB file.  It took roughly 25 minutes.

At 9K/sec, 2,000,000/9,000 = 222 seconds, or under 4 minutes.
If the file were compressed first it would be 1/3 as long (I tried 
gzipping it), or about 1 minute transfer time.

This implies that the tar/untar part of send/receive took about 24
minutes.  Tar at the pentium end is nearly instant (128MB RAM, 233MHz 
cpu), so it is slowing things down on the 386.

I was able to transfer after setting up pppd at 115200 (it pinged okay but 
the test packet took 110 mseconds, whereas ethernet ping is something like 
.3 ms, or I may be wrong but it is much faster anyway.  The speed ratio of 
110 to .3 is about 330, and that below about 800, but there is some 
overhead involved as well).

Based on previous experience transferring the entire linux setup from one 
drive to another via ethernet, the slowest part of the process is gzipping 
the large .tar file.

> > > Serial transfer is about 10K/sec,
> > > ethernet 1-10MB/sec
> > > parallel was in between (1/40 of ethernet = 250K, 8x serial = 80K?)
> >
> > I get the following:
> > serial:     9K/sec  @115200
> I was rounding. 
> > ethernet: 700K/sec
> That is 10MBit ethernet.  The 100MBit is ten times as fast in theory.
>
> > plip:      38K/sec


Anyway, I think it would be faster, when one of the computers involved is 
a 386 with 5MB RAM, not to tar/untar during the send process.

It took about 5 minutes (guessing) to unzip the swap.zip file using linux 
during the file transfer.  I think unzip or gunzip might run faster if not 
done during transfer when there is not much memory, but it still might be 
better to avoid using zip on a slow computer.

How would I modify these scripts to send/receive uncompressed files? I 
could then gunzip the .tgz file, transfer the .tar file, and just untar 
(which is much faster) on the 386 target.  Will pkg work on .tar as 
opposed to .tgz files?  Or I can manually tar -xvf on / and run the 
install script.

I am thinking of transferring links2 binary that way.  The rest of the 
packages are small enough to transfer via floppy disk (not counting 
abiword, which won't work on the 386 anyway, nor will other X programs, at 
a reasonable speed).  I can also split up links2 binary to two floppy 
disks.  But not all laptop computers still have working floppy drives.

I was hunting through the old emails looking for Steven's script to use 
netcat to send a .tgz package and untar it automatically with the receive 
script and not save the .tgz package and cannot find it, nor can google. 
Someone please steer me to it, thanks.  I copied it to some place safe....
But I think sending an uncompressed file might work better here.

The 386 cursor problem disappeared when we put in a working backlight. 
The linux cursor seems to be harder to see than the DOS cursor.

A 386 with 5M is hardly ideal even for CLI.  Kermit took about 36 sec 
to reload.  It is taking nearly as long to exit.  (Maybe next time I boot 
linux with swap file it will go faster?).