I do not work in my company?s MIS group, but am involved when issues arise. Specifically I am the CAD AE and am knowledgeable about NT networks etc. (not Novel) and have spent MANY hours of workstation testing in order to find the optimal network settings. I have tested every version of the Novel client, no client etc. Our company runs Novel v5 for the corporate apps etc. and NT for all of the engineering ?stuff? but all I am really concerned about is the NT side of the network.
In engineering we access large assembly data from the CAD system (through dedicated NT servers) and the performance seems to fluctuate so much from month to month.
A typical setup is as follows
1. Workstations are the latest + greatest I.e., Dell Workstations P4 1.5Ghz, 1GB PC800 mem, dual 9GB Ultra 3 LVD, Wildcat Graphics
2. Have NT4.0 SP6a (wkst+srvr)
3. Logon through the Novel client V. 4.8 with file caching off
4. Directly mapped to several NT shares and Novel shares
5. The network setting is as follows. Microsoft is at the top in the network access order, the protocols are Nwlink IPX/SPX, Nwlink Net Bios and TCP
6. The nic?s are set to 100/half
7. TCP is set to use DHCP and there is nothing set in the DNS, WINS dialogues.
8. In the bindings area, NWLink IPX/SPX are at the top for all services except the server, which WINS is at the top.
9. The PDC has a gigabit nic and is directly connected to a full duplex gigabit switch via fiber and there are three 100MB hub?s plugged into that switch. So there are users that are plugged into the gigabit switch and the rest are plugged onto the 100MB hubs
The question is basically this. Is the fact that we are running Novel and Win together that can cause performance issues? Whydo we take a 5x-performance hit pulling data off the network as opposed to local? I am looking for any suggestions on the proper netowrk configuration, sever settings etc. The MI
