[luau] Slow routing

[Michael Ableyev]

Hi all,
I havent posted to the list in a long while.. have been relocating and busy in 
general.
Now (I think) I'm back for a while.

...And already I have questions to ask.
Is anyone aware of any bandwidth throtling enabled by default in Mandrake 9.0?
Perhaps thats not the cause of my slowdowns, so I should describe my little 
setup.. perhaps someone will see a problem and make me aware of it :)

Have a desktop and a laptop with 1 nic each connected to a 10Mbit hub, cable 
modem is also plugged into the same hub. Mandrake running on the desktop (just 
had to see whats it like) and Slackware on the laptop.
Now, having only 1 ip provided by the cable company and not wanting to run a 
separate machine for a router, I have both of them acting as routers.
I have a little script (same on both machines: "cable on / cable off") that when 
needed simply assigns a local ip to eth0:1 and gets the external ip from the 
modem, then sets up the iptables rules as needed and sends an update to 
dyndns.org. Then when I want to boot the desktop to windows to play some game 
the script releases the ip and I type "cable on" on the laptop to assume the 
same role. Now everything would be fine, but... when the laptop is acting as the 
router I get 8mbps downstream and 700kbps up (yes, Optimum Online is that fast!) 
on both machines (actually I only see about 5mbps down on the desktop but i 
think thats because the hub can't handle more), and when the desktop is doing 
the routing, I still get the same speed on the desktop but the laptop only sees 
600/600kpbs of it.

Any ideas?