Downloads randomly come to a full stop for Linux comps at my school

BeholdMyGlory · 2009-03-23 21:53:28

Recently, I've been put in charge of installing Linux on a couple of computers at my school (which otherwise run windows on everything).

But I've been experiencing a few network problems. There problems occur for all Linux computers connected to the schools network, but it doesn't effect the windows computers at all. No matter whether I've connected the new computers (or my own for that matter) through wireless or cable, the problem persists.

The problem is, that when downloading something, anything (including videos on youtube, packages with pacman, files with wget, etc), the downloads will suddenly, and seemingly randomly, come to a complete stop. For example, when upgrading or installing a package with pacman, the download might stop at say 26%, and the only way to continue is pressing ctrl+c, and restarting pacman. With large packages, this will probably occur 5-20 times or more for a single file (which made it quite a pain installing X+KDE).

As I've already said, this does NOT happen with the windows computers connected in the same way to the very same network.

The only cause I can think of i this:
The whole school's network goes through a couple of windows servers at the local city hall. How and why this would affect the network I don't know, but it's the only thing I can think of. If this really is the cause, I don't think it would be very easy to get in contact with the people working there, especially since they're probably not to happy with the fact that we are installing Linux.

So, does anyone have an idea as to why we have this problem?

fukawi2 · 2009-03-23 22:29:37

I had similar problems once with an OpenVPN tunnel.

Turned out there was something outside the tunnel between the 2 end-points that couldn't handle the enlarged MTU, so I had to drop the MTU of the tunnel, so that by the time the overhead of the OpenVPN tunnel was added, the MTU of the ecapsulated packets was smalle enough for the intermediatary device.

I documented it here for OpenVPN:
http://platypus.wandin.net/dotclear/ind … N-MTU-Size

I know it's not exactly the same issue, but it seems to be the same symptoms...

Arch Linux

#1 2009-03-23 21:53:28

Downloads randomly come to a full stop for Linux comps at my school

#2 2009-03-23 22:29:37

Re: Downloads randomly come to a full stop for Linux comps at my school

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