In my flat at university there are 2 restrictions on the network connection;
1.) only registered MAC addresses can connect (& only 2 registrations per student)
2.) 802.1x authentication is required on all connections
Now because I have more than 2 machines I want to connect, & not all of them are capablle of 802.1x authentication, I have just put together an XP machine with 2x NICs, & am using it as a gateway using ICS (Internet Connection Sharing). Now the ICS works, & machines with neither registered MACs nor authentication can access the network (I am posting this from one of them), however...
The Internet connection on the XP machine itself is fast - an internet speed test clocked a 1MB download at 3.3MBits/sec. However any machines behind the gateway are dreadfully slow. I have 1x Win 2k machine & 2x SuSE Linux machines - the Win 2k machine is usable, however slower than dial-up speeds. The Linux machines are virtually useless, often taking upwards of 10 minutes to load Google, or simply failing to load at all.
There is nothing wrong with the network itself - I threw some video files around last night to check speeds, & got speeds above 4MBytes/sec.
So as there is nothing wrong with the network itself, & the fact that this Win 2k machine performs better than the Linux machines, I have to put the problem down to XP. Does anybody know what might be wrong? Could it simply be that the XP machine is running with only 160MB of RAM? (Though it's own Internet connection is fast...).


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