the distro kunundrum...

[mailinglist-mi3mfHwaxRn2eFz/2MeuCQ at public.gmane.org (Brendan)]

On Monday 16 November 2009, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> On Nov 16, 2009, at 12:29 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 12:22:55PM -0500, Stephen Adler wrote:
> >> Well... so I've boxed myself in... At work I ordered a Dell (I had no
> >> choice really, the IT guys only buy Dells) to run RHEL for a backup
> >> system I'm putting together. After way to much time fussing around, I
> >> finally got the damn thing up and running. I then go to test the network
> >> and the network performance is very bad. So I mess around, putting in
> >> different nic cards brands only to find that the problem doesn't go way.
> >> Next I burn a fedora 11 live CD, fire it up and lo and behold, I get
> >> close to 100Mbytes/sec data rate over the nic, as what I would expect.
> >>
> >> So now I have a choice of wiping off RHEL and putting on fedora or
> >> somehow getting a newer kernel installed... which in the end breaks the
> >> model of getting enterprise software for an enterprise application....
> >> Putting a home grown not RHEL supported kernel on RHEL basically voids
> >> the warenty sort to speak....
> >>
> >>
> >> any words of advice? I'm kind of blowing off steam right now...
> >
> > Perhaps something besides "the whole kernel" is causing the
> > issue? I would check the driver versions for the NIC you are
> > using (RHEL vs Fedora) and see if RHEL is doing something odd
> > with sysctl parameters or a firewall.
> 
> Never hurts to give a quick spin through bugzilla.redhat.com as well, see
>  if maybe there's a bugzilla opened with a patch queued up. You didn't
>  mention the NIC model and/or driver. Mention it, and maybe someone could
>  take a peek and see what's in the queue in the way of network driver
>  patches that could be relevant...
> 

What tools were used to test? What kind of tests were run?
Were the cables tested, what about debug output? Perhaps one kernel has a few 
options on that the other doesn't...What about a vanilla kernel, etc.?
The OP leaves a lot to be desired in this QA...