I was wondering if there were any sort of tweaks that can improve the wireless networking between my G4 PB (AE WirelessG) & G3 PB (Airport Card WirelessB).
I can surf the net very fast and from prior testing, Rogers has been kind enough to grant me around 350kb/sec transfer rates. The reception on both PBs is always at 4 bars and I'm using the NetGear 4-port 802.11g router. The only problem that I have is improving file transfer speeds between the two machines. I use to have WEP enabled, but I've heard that it causes poor performance. I've since disabled that and just setup an access list to allow certain MAC addresses to logon.
Now the weird part is if I use the Network feature to mount one of the computers, the transfer rate on a 10mb file is 2mins. If I access the computer via FTP, the 10mb transfer improves to 1:36mins. That's very weird and if there are any wireless networking gurus, I'm all ears on your opinions.
The wireless router's distance is not far at all, but it should not be much of a factor since the signal indicator is always full.
Wireless can be finicky, it depends on many things, you might try to do the FTP and it could come out around the same next time you do it. My suggestion, for performance and speed would be to actually get a small crossover cable to put between the PB's since they are both wireless. The transfer rate on Wireless B is terribly slow between machines on a network, your performance would surely improve if you use an actual crossover cable.
Other than that, if you want to keep it wireless, you will have to deal with up and down speeds... there are many things which can interfere with wireless.
If you get a program which will tell you your actual wireless signal in percentage, you will see what I mean. Check out MacStumbler or iStumbler.
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When mixing B and G cards, the router will automatically swith to the slowest one.
"a chain is only as strong as its weakest link..."
FTP is a very effective way to communicate.
it makes a complete, and good use of the TCP/IP implementation, and it only does that.
when you mount the drive in Finder, it uses TCP/IP as well now, but mixes it with Rendez vous, which I think is based on the SAMBA protocol. (don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong).
because of that, it carries more information as the more infos, the more work...
And this has nothing to do with WIFI.
it would be the same using a good old wired connection.
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Thanks for your valuable input. I appreciate it much. Perhaps the mixing of B & G cards isn't that well liked between the two computers. But it's just weird that the OS can maintain a fast connection to the internet, via the wireless router, but cannot communicate to each other effectively when there's no bandwidth limit from the ISP.
My ISP is like 3mbps, while a max .11b card is 11mbps, but it seems so much slower...feels like about 50kb/sec transfer rates between wireless machines.
Nevertheless, I'll just stick with using target disk mode, since they're both portables.
But, is there a way of tweaking the settings of the wireless adapters so there's not so much overhead? I remember in a windows machines, we would jump into the registry and adjust specific values to increase the flow of data. I know, it would be really tricky, but it's worth a shot.
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