10/100 NIC

[Kevin Buettner]

On Jan 31,  2:27pm, AZ_Pete wrote:

> I just finished upgrading my home network to 100Mbit.  I installed 10/100
> cards in all my machines (2 Windows boxes and 3 Linux boxes) and installed a

What kind of cards do you have?

> new 10/100 Hub.  However, when I FTP files to the any of the Linux boxes the
> upload speed isn't any faster than when I was running only 10Mbit cards, the
> transfer speed indicater in the application shows the same transfer rate.
> Also, when I start my VNC session against my Linux box, the refreshing of
> the KDE screen is not any faster either.

Once you get it working, you should notice a difference.  You'll notice
an even bigger difference after you use it for a while and are all of
a sudden forced to go back to 10Mbps for a while.  (This recently
happened to me when my power supply died on my Netgear switch.  I
used an old 10Mbps hub until I was able figure out something for
a replacement power supply.

> When I copy files between the two Windows machines, the process is a LOT
> faster than before.  This indicates that the Windows machines are talking to
> each other at 100Mbit, but the Linux machines still seem to be at 10Mbit.
> The hub shows all machines linked at 100Mbit.

Use ftp on some large files and see what it reports the transfer rates
as being.  E.g...

ftp> put 7.0-i386-powertools.iso
local: 7.0-i386-powertools.iso remote: 7.0-i386-powertools.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,2,7,135,219)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 7.0-i386-powertools.iso.
226 Transfer complete.
614799360 bytes sent in 59 secs (1e+04 Kbytes/sec)

...which is about right for a 100Mbps link between the machines.

> Is there some way I can tell if the cards in the Linux machine are actually
> receiving/transmitting at 100Mbit?

Sometimes the 10/100 cards have an LED which indicates whether it's
running at 10Mbps or 100Mbps.

Also, take a look at the boot messages.  E.g. in one of my /var/log/messages*
files, I see the following:

3c59x.c:v0.99H 11/17/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html 
eth0: 3Com 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx at 0xf880,  00:50:04:6e:1c:e8, IRQ 9 
  8K byte-wide RAM 5:3 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/Autonegotiate interface. 
  MII transceiver found at address 24, status 786d. 
  MII transceiver found at address 0, status 786d. 
  Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives. 

> Is there a setting I must activate for Linux to utilize the new 100Mbit
> connection?

Some drivers may have a way of enabling the speed (media) at module
loading time.  E.g: See Documentation/networking/vortex.txt in the
kernel sources.  (The options listed in your file may not work for
your card since I don't know what kind of card(s) you have.)

Also, take a look at the "media" option of the ifconfig command.

Kevin