Topic: Network Card Settings with SME 5.6

[David Brown]

I recently upgraded our office server from SME 5.5 to 5.6, and I am experiencing a considerable reduction in network speed with transfers to and from our server.  We are running a 10/100 network with a 10/100 hub, and have had network speeds that are consistent with the 100Mbps speeds prior to the upgrade, but now everything running to and from our server is running at the 10Mbps speed.  Our server has 2 Linksys LNE100TX NICs using the tulip network driver.  I have isolated the problem to the settings of my server's network cards by running tulip-diag from the eth-diag-2.2-fr1.i386.rpm package.  Following is the output from running tulip-diag (I'm only showing one Index output to save space):

tulip-diag.c:v2.08 5/15/2001 Donald Becker (becker@scyld.com)
 http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
Index #1: Found a Lite-On PNIC-II adapter at 0xd000.
 Port selection is 10mpbs-serial, half-duplex.
 Transmit started, Receive started, half-duplex.
  The Rx process state is 'Waiting for packets'.
  The Tx process state is 'Idle'.
  The transmit threshold is 72.
  The NWay status register is 000000ca.
 The current PNIC-II MAC address is 00:a0:cc:e2:a7:19 (a000a000 e2cc19a7).
 The current PNIC-II WOL address is 00:a0:cc:e2:a7:19.
  Internal autonegotiation state is 'Autonegotiation disabled'.

The way I understand it, I want Autonegotiation to be enabled, and the port selection to be set to Auto-select the network speed, but I don't know how to adjust these settings.  Has anyone else on this list experienced a similar situation or can someone point me in the right direction?  Thanks for any help you can provide.

David Brown
FF&J Architects
dbrown@ffj.yi.org

[Jochen Hoegerl]

For such issues I always used (successfully) a DOS-Bootdisk and the dos-tools that comes with the nic's driver disk.

jochen

[David Brown]

Are you suggesting that this is a hardware setting as opposed to a software setting?  I would expect that the NIC settings can be controlled through the OS with config files of some sort.

David Brown
FF&J Architects
dbrown@ffj.yi.org

[Jochen Hoegerl]

Well, I'm not such a expirienced Linux user, all I have seen right now are things how to pass irq and i/o to nics. Normally a nic is defaulting to autosensing
its speed and duplex-setting, but sometimes it does not and then i use the old fashioned way that i know that work.

jochen

[Mike Drummond]

My experience has been mixed with cards auto sensing / auto negotiating.  There are often problems when the hubs , switches and NICs  are from different manufactures.  So I have (for my servers) always set the cards manually .  While  in MS Windows you can usually do it throught the card driver.  For other OSs I just use the DOS disk approach.  Is fast and simple.   I have not seen any utilities or ability to send the setup to a NIC for these advanced features under unix.

Cheers
Mike Drummond

[Henrik Mønster]

Hi

I'm sorry to say, that I have no suggestion for you....... but I have the exactly same problem (
I use 5.6 and 3Com 905C - with the 59x driver as I must use.
I tried to set the card manually, and it worked until just now, where it seemed to default back to 10 mbps after a total system shutdown.

Any suggestions are more than welcome - changing of conf. files, module parameters, anything ;o)

Regards, Henrik.

[Henrik Moenster]

Now I have changed my 3Com 3C905C with a cheap RealTek 8139C nic, and the problems are all gone!?

100 mbps/fd with no problems - I still think it's strange, but the driver support for the realtek must be better or what?

Regards Henrik

[Robert]

Have a look at www.scyld.com/network. It's the official source for most Linux ethernet drivers and has pages about the individual drivers with configuration details. If you find the correct options for your card, you can put these in /etc/modules.conf. About the driver support for Realtek 8139C: mileages may vary. The 8139too driver caused a complete system lockdown on my machine. Donald Becker's rtl8139 driver, of which the 8139too driver is a bad rip-off (according to Becker himself), works flawlessly.