I just bought a G4 400 and am trying to network it to my old 6500/225. The 6500 has a PCI Ethernet card and I bought a Ethernet cross over cable. I can get the two machines to talk to each other but when I try and copy from one to the other the speed is impossible slow. 5 meg took over an hour.What am I doing wrong and how do I fix it?

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The reason why it doesn't work is because you are using a cross-over cable. Cross over cables work in theory, but are terribly unreliable. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.

The best solution is to borrow/rent/purchase a cheap hub. With a hub and OS 8 or higher you should achieve a transfer speed of about 800 KB/sec to 1.2 MB/sec depending on your hardware and OS version. With a switch, you may get higher, but that would definately be overkill in your situation.

I would strongly recommend using a hub. Trust me, it's worth it (I had file corruptions transfering over cross-over cables, and migrated to a hub instead).

Hope this helps.

I had the same problem with my iMac. I just deleted the corresponding preference files and then it worked fine. Give it a try...

[Paul Huang]

I disagree with your assessment on crossover ethernet cable. I have setup dozens of small offices with crossover (either 10BaseT or 100BaseTX) and NONE of them had problems. It's just as reliable as any switch or hub.

On my SGI 02, I am able to transfer 1.5 GB block of file to a Mac (both with UW) through ethernet (With XiNet's KA share) in less than 120 seconds.

I would look into the system software for the ethernet card now resides in the 6500. With standard AppleTalk over ethernet (without Apple IP), the transfer rate should be around 1 MB/sec. for 100BaseT.

The cross-over should work, try an new cross-over cable.

There might be a negotiation problem between the 10/100base-Tx G4, and the 10base-T 6500.
There is a utility to set the speed to the G4's ethernet, somewhere. Set it to 10base-T, half-duplex. Then try again.

After you are done, set it back to auto.
Using a 10/100base-T hub should also work.

[This message has been edited by valentinedwv (edited 11-01-1999).]

The only problem with crossover cables is with AppleTalk. When AppleTalk nodes choose and bind an address at startup, they check the wire to find a cable range and other info. If a link is absent (the other device isn't powered on or has no driver loaded), it freaks out AppleTalk and causes it to revert to a serial port instead. That's why connecting two Macs with a crossover cable results in one or both of them giving that error message at startup but then working when rebooted.

I would buy a hub anyway. 10Mbit ones are dirt cheap.

this is somewhat on the same subject

ive got a g4 yikes (400MHz ..yada yada...)and a g3 powerbook (400MHz.... yada yada...) both have 100bT and when connected via a cat 5 cross patch cable i can fileshare fine via appleshare

but i was wondering what sort of speeds i should get on average in the real world when i copy files from one puter to the other

ive got a lan benchmarker that tells me that i can transfer at approx 16Mbits/s or if you like 2Mbytes/s and no where can i find whether this is a good speed or not

real files seem to transfer at a similar speed too

now the limits of transfers will be the speed at which the hd's can squirt their data but i would have thought that if the 100bT max speed is about 12MBytes/s then im not getting anywhere near that with 2MB/sec; ive tried to copy files from ramdisk on one puter to ramdisk on the other and from a diskimage to diskimage as well as from real hd to hd the speed seems not to vary

am i just the holder of an unreasonable expectation????

what speeds should i expect?

ive had ppl tell me that a hub would help, ive had others tell me that the cross patch cable will do fine

can anyone enlighten me as to whether to enable tcp/ip in filesharing or not (are there any benefits to this) also does netdoubler work too speed things up?

any info would be appreciated

thanks