[Pmwiki-users] update on pmwiki page load problem

Davis, James C. jdavis at cob.tamucc.edu
Tue Sep 17 18:13:08 CDT 2002


I have done some more testing on the page load problem that I posted to the
list a couple of weeks ago. In case you don't remember, I am having trouble
with some, but not all computers accessing our WikiWikiWeb. On certain
computers (only seems to be some computers on our firewalled subnet) it
takes 3-4 minutes for each wiki page to load. I have found something very
interesting. The problem seems to follow the NIC card.

Scenario:

Two test machines configured similarly: Windows 2000, IE 5.5, same model NIC
card.
Machine A - wiki pages load immediately
Machine B - wiki pages load after 3-4 minutes

I swap the NIC cards so that A gets B's and B gets A's.

After swap:

Machine A - wiki pages load after 3-4 minutes
Machine B - wiki pages load immediately

Swapping the immediate-loading card in to another slow-loading machine had
the same results.

I ran in to something like this when trying to set up a WINS server after
our client machines went behind the firewall. Some machines could see the
PDC fine, and some could not. This problem also followed the NIC card. I
finally ended up putting IPX on everything so the clients could find the
servers. This was not something I wanted to do, but was the only way I could
get it to work at the time. (Windows 2000 DNS now eliminates the need for
this kludge)

My conclusion so far would be that this is a networking problem, but I will
have to do more in depth tests to be sure. I will try to capture network
traffic during a page request from a working and non-working machine to
compare.

Please let me know if you have any insight in to this. I know firewalls can
sometimes do some weird things, but I've never heard of one doing this.

Thanks,

James Davis
Network Manager
College of Business
Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
(361) 825-5926
jdavis at cob.tamucc.edu




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