[jamesx]

We have had 4 buildings upgrade to 10.4.3 and all 4 of those buildings are having network problems ever since the upgrade. All other buildings are OK and these effects happened right after making the update.

One program loads on the computers and has to pull its data from a building server. This now takes minutes instead of seconds.

Apple Remote Desktop will disconnect often. If you are observing over 15 computers, they will frequently drop connection with you. If you try to drag a window or an icon through ARD, it will drop the connection, reconnect, let you drag it a tiny bit further and then drop again. It doesn't matter if the the ARD admin is using Mac OS X 10.4.2 or 10.4.3, it's slow either way. Only the computers with 10.4.2 still work normal through ARD without dropping connections.

Internet has also been reported as really slow, but only on the 10.4.3 computers.

I am not sure if there is some buffer setting that changed between 10.4.2 and 10.4.3 or what could have happened!?

This happened right after the upgrade so there must be something related. Please help!

[Tomchu]

I've noticed this too. I'll explain my situation, and then why I think it's happening.

We have a massive 24-port 100 Mbit hub at work in our computer lab, and when I take my 12" iBook G4 to work, I usually hook it up to one of the ports on the hub (we have no wireless). Local LAN access and Internet access have always been snappy, even though we're on a hub and our lab network is pretty heavily-trafficked. As you know, hubs are pretty "dumb" devices in that whatever comes in one port is repeated to all the other ports -- the hub leaves it up to the Ethernet adapter/OS on the receiving side to filter out the Ethernet frames that are not meant for that station.

This used to never be a problem up until I showed up at work one day with 10.4.3 installed.

We have a FreeBSD server running Samba that we dump benchmarks and other huge data onto. As soon as a friend of mine started a ~15 GB transfer, my network access went to ****. My ping times to the local server were abysmal, my transfer rates to the local server were in the tens of kilobytes, and the Internet was pretty much unusable.

What seems to have happened is that the Ethernet adapters have been put into promiscuous mode with 10.4.3. What that means is that the adapter accepts everything as being meant for it, and leaves it up to the OS to filter the packets. This, unfortunately, completely kills your network connection if you're receiving thousands of packets per second that are not meant for you. Within about one hour I had clocked up something like 1 million discarded packets.

[jamesx]

I too noticed a large difference between the ping times between a computer running 10.3.9 and a computer running 10.4.3

Is there any chance you know of a work around for this? This sounds exactly like what is happening to me. Because they have said that when one student logs into this program that communicates with the server, it usually goes fairly good. By the time the 4th or 5th student starts connecting, it slows down a lot. Once the 30th student tries to connect, it takes 3-5 minutes instead of about 5 seconds to start running.

There's no utilities to fix this? or maybe certain files that can be copied from a 10.4.2 computer to the 10.4.3 one to correct it?

Thanks a lot for your help. Knowing I'm not alone in this makes me feel a bit better too.