I’m having a real problem with the built in network card on my home linux machine (currently running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server or affectionately named Hardy Heron).

There’s a couple of proviso’s attached to this howto, the first one being that if Ubuntu release a new Kernel as an update, you may have to re-run this fix, or if the old Realtec driver (r8169) gets fixed in the new Kernel , you may want to unblacklist that module and run with that.

Current Kernel version:

billy@orion:~$ uname -r
2.6.24-23-server

The symtoms are:

• Very bad download and upload speeds
• Huge amounts of dropped RX packets

Output from ifconfig below:

billy@orion:~$ ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:18:a8:93:4d
inet addr:192.168.1.15 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::230:18ff:fea8:934d/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:46909802 errors:0 dropped:345543907 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:34564243 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2672691663 (2.4 GB) TX bytes:1478308929 (1.3 GB)
Interrupt:221

As you can see below, lspci correctly identifies my Network card as Realtek RTL8101E NIC.

billy@orion:~$ lspci | grep Rea
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02)

My home server is currently running the r8169 stock driver supplied with Hardy Heron. After doing some research, I discovered that the best way to solve the problem is to replace stock Kernel driver with one supplied by the network card manufacturers Realtek. So I’m going to replace the currently loaded driver r8169 with the driver supplied by Realtek (r8101).

lsmod | grep r81
r8169 33028 0

Since I’ve not installed anything from source on this server (vanilla server), I’ll need to install the linux header files and essential tools.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Next we need to download the drivers from the Realtek ftp site:

ftp://210.51.181.211/cn/nic/r8101-1.012.00.tar.bz2

After that we need to untar them, make and install them see steps below:

tar -jxvf r8101-1.012.00.tar.bz2
cd r8101-1.012.00

sudo su
make clean modules
make install
depmod -a
update-initramfs -u

You will need to add the r8169 module to the blacklist so that it doesn’t get reloaded after reboot, to do that type the following to edit the blacklist file.

nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Add the following text at the bottom of the file and save.

blacklist r8169

Now we need to reboot the fileserver and hopefully all will be well.

shutdown -r now

After the reboot, best to check if the module has loaded successfully type:

lsmod | grep r81

You should get the output below if you are successfull

r8101 36368 0

You can also check to make sure that the eth0 interface has come up successfully by using the command below.

ifconfig eth0

If all goes well, you should get output similar to what I got below, note that now I have no more dropped RX packets:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:30:18:a8:93:4d
inet addr:192.168.1.15  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::230:18ff:fea8:934d/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:3559288 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2539703 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:406768903 (387.9 MB)  TX bytes:497335487 (474.2 MB)
Interrupt:17 Base address:0x2000

Optional:

You might want to check to make sure that your ethernet card is running at the correct duplex and speed using ethtool. To do this type the following at a command prompt (shell).

sudo ethtool eth0

As you can see from my output, all is well in the world of home linux for me

Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: pumbg
Wake-on: g
Current message level: 0x00000033 (51)
Link detected: yes

Below are some of the references I used to write this mini-howto.

References:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=782267
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/322916
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=28371
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/need-help-installing-driver-for-ethernet-card-658674/?highlight=RTL8101E
http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2008/09/22/ubuntu-8041-and-the-d945gclf-little-falls/
http://en.alessiotreglia.com/articles/how-to-compile-r8168-and-r8101-modules-for-realtek-ethernet-adapters/