[SlugBug] FTP strangeness causing rapid hair loss

[Jonathan]

Evening all,

I've had a weird FTP problem which has been slowly getting more and more 
   perplexing as I've tried more and more things to try and figure it out.

I'm sitting on a LAN here with a FreeBSD box, a Windoze XP box and a 
Lucent CellPIPE router. The switch is a cheapy Negear 5 port 10/100 
type. Both PCs use SiS cards (2.99 from ebuyer)

Here's the problem... when I try and copy things BSD<>XP I am seeing 
transfer rates somewhere in the region of 200kbps. Tonight I started 
trying to run extra copies of WS-FTP. I'm now running 3 copies, they are 
transferring at roughly 200, 220 and 370 kbps in the order I started 
them running. They've been going long enough to suggest these are 
sustained rates.

So, the question is, why is it happening and how can I get back to the 
sort of speeds I should have? I've switched ports, cables, NICs (only 
the same type). I'm running a fully updated XP, FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE with 
the latest version of proftpd installed with a default configuration. I 
have no firewall running on either box. Both boxes are saying they are 
running at 100Mbps, the Lucent at 10Mbps. Unplugging the Lucent (not for 
long, my LAN doesn't like being an island :) ) makes no difference to 
the situation. Both boxes are running hardware RAID mirrors and there 
are no signs of disk problems.

Any suggestions, please, before I start borrowing switches/NICs?

- Jonathan

--
There are 10 sorts of people. Those who understand binary
and those who don't.