I thought netgear made good switches...

[Fahrvergnuugen]

Ok, so maybe they do make good switches...
but listen to what ours is doing:

I have a road runner and they give me 3 IP addresses. I have three computers hooked up [two OSX G4s and 1 pee cee]. The cable modem uses the uplink port on the switch and the computers are all plugged directly into it.

When I try and transfer a file via AFP or FTP between the OSX machines, it only goes at 40k/s. Since this is the upload cap on our rr service, it is obvious to me that the switch is routing the packets all the way back out to the internet instead of directly between the computers at a 100mb connection.

a) Why the heck does it do this?!
b) How do I fix it?

 

[.dev.lqd]

What -might- be happening (although routing is ridiculously complicated technology) is that you're default route... the place your packets go FIRST, is the router for your ISP. So... to get ANYWHERE, even on your LAN, packets go to this address FIRST.

You'd have to look into ways to add more default routes. If you were using a simple cable router (like a linksys one with a built in switch) it offers interfaces to do this (and would save you the money for your per month extra ip's [unless you're lucky and our ISP doesn't rip you off monthly]).

There ought to be a way to add it directly to os X... maybe through netinfo or some of the /etc files... look around the unix/linux sites and search around for adding routes or manual routing under darwin or osx...

Manual routing is basically a list of addresses to bounce your packets to... which for your LAN would only require two addresses, both of them the IP address of your other machines. Your computer would then just broadcast the packets addressed to that machine, which would pick it up because that's its IP address.