LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Richard Sharpe <sharpe@ns.aus.com>
  To  : David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
        <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 20:16:21 +1000

Re: mbs M/bs xyz/s

At 10:18 PM 11/30/00 +1030, David Lloyd wrote:
>
>Can someone tell me what these damned appelations mean?
>
>i.e.
>mb/s
>mB/S
>(are they the same thing)

There are standard ways of writing these things.

M means Mega
m means milli
k mean kilo
u can be considered to be micro (for the greek mu)

b means bit
B means byte

MB/s is essentially the same as MBs or MBps, and means Mega Bytes per second
Mb/s is Mega bits per second

mB/s is milli Bytes per second, which is 9 orders of magnitude less than MB/s!

And so on.

>kb/s
>bps
>baud
>
>wotever...
>
>I'm totally cofused (again)....
>
>dlRichard Sharpe wrote:
>> 
>> At 11:19 AM 11/30/00 +1030, David Lloyd wrote:
>> >
>> >Hi!
>> >
>> >I've finally managed to reactivate my second computer which is a:
>> >
>> >* 450MHZ k6-III [1]
>> >* 64 Mb RAM
>> >* relatively slow hard drive
>> >
>> >As in relatively slow, it's the current bottleneck on the computer. I
>> >use Coax which is, I think, only 10mb/s so the network isn't
>>                                   ^^^^^^
>> 
>> That should be 10Mb/s, unless your setup is such that you actually get 10
>> milli-bits per second.
>> 
>> >extraordinarily fast [2]. Now, if I've got it correct given that I'm the
>> >only one using this machine on the network (there are only two machines
>> >on the network) and it isn't a file server [3], the speed of my coax and
>> >the hard drive won't particularly matter.
>> 
>> 10Mb/s is ~ 1MB/s, which is not slow, especially compared to your ISP
>> access rate.
>> 
>> However, if you are concerned, a pair of 10/100 cards (RTL8139-based) and a
>> cross-over cable is cheap enough ... Ought be less than $100, and possibly
>> closer to $50.
>> 
>> >Especially since I use a very inexpensive, but slow ISP [4].
>> >
>> >Now, I also intend to use:
>> >
>> >* a full blown name server (BIND 8.2.latest-stable)
>> >* SendMail
>> >* DHCP
>> >* SSHD
>> >
>> >The SendMail will act as a relay for my main machine which will still
>> >deal with all of my e-mail.
>> >
>> >From my understanding, none of these utilities/programs or such are
>> >terribly disk intensive so my slow hard drive wouldn't kill them.
>> >Furthermore, my slow Coax network wouldn't essentially be a bottle neck
>> >either, or would it....
>> >
>> >What's peoples' opinion on this?
>> >
>> >DL
>> >
>> >[1]
>> >I think a 500MHZ K6-II would have been faster :-(
>> >
>> >[2]
>> >Yes, I know. Coax...irck...but it's what I've got and I don't have a
>> >twisted pair cable and unless there's a reason I'm not wasting $25 to
>> >get one
>> >
>> >[3]
>> >The hard drive is only about 1 Gig or something
>> >
>> >[4]
>> >Don't get me wrong - for ~30-35 AUD I get about 360 hours per month with
>> >unlimited downloads and I've downloaded heaps in terms of mail, ftp and
>> >http
>> >
>> >PS:
>> >Interestingly, I have managed to make StarOffice 5.2 by Sun (not an
>> >OpenOffice version) go fast! How? Stack 383MB of memory into an Athlon
>> >650MHZ with a reasonably fast hard drive...rebuild the kernel using
>> >Athlon GCC (based on pgcc) [i] and in fact it loads in, like, 2 seconds
>> >and I now think my latest bottleneck is the hard drive system...sigh...I
>> >want to eventually implement a RAID2 (or is it 1...where you basically
>> >write/read alternatively to two drives, striping I think is the
>> >technical term) with two 7200RPM drives....
>> >
>> >[i]
>> >Not for the faint hearted. I feel over the "-O3 and above have serious
>> >bug" problem...and I would get things like "Register EAX....cannot
>> >derefence NULL pointer errors" at start up and other odd times...and it
>> >nearly crashed my damn file system - lucky I realised what was happening
>> >and powered down before it did whatever it was doing too badly [ii].
>> >
>> >[ii]
>> >The advantages of having multiple, smaller partitions as opposed to one
>> >huge partition, is that file system crashes will hopefully choose to
>> >trash something like /usr or /usr/local or /tmp or /etc or /home rather
>> >than /boot or / :-)
>> >
>> >--
>> >Are you:
>> > - waiting for rigor mortis to set on?
>> > - or waiting for Santa Claus to arrive?
>> > (see Eric Berne, Beyond Games and Scripts)
>> >
>> >--
>> >LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
>> >To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
>> >  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject
>> >
>> >
>> 
>> Regards
>> -------
>> Richard Sharpe, sharpe@ns.aus.com
>> Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
>> Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
>> Author, Special Edition, Using Samba
>> 
>> --
>> LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
>> To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
>>   mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject
>
>-- 
>Are you:
> - waiting for rigor mortis to set on?
> - or waiting for Santa Claus to arrive?
> (see Eric Berne, Beyond Games and Scripts)
>
>-- 
>LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
>To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
>  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject
>
>

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, sharpe@ns.aus.com
Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Author, Special Edition, Using Samba


-- 
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