Tag Archives: home server

Realtek RTL8101E NIC dropped frames on Hardy Heron

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

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