On Tuesday 02 October 2007, Eric Estes wrote:I recently purchased a Shuttle XPC SN27P2 which uses the Nvidia nForce 570Ultra chipset. Getting Debian installed (or any other distro) is easyenough and my onboard NIC is detected (Marvell 88E1116) but my networkspeed is as slow or slower than dial-up.I've turned off the onboard NIC in the BIOS and installed an Intel NIC andit was also detected fine but my speeds are still just as slow.
Maybe it's a duplex detection problem. You might play with 'ethtool' or 'mii-tool' and see what Linux thinks your network settings are. If you're using a hub and the computer is in full- duplex, the speed will be extremely slow because the computer will be creating collisions without realizing it. Likewise, if you're using a switch that's in full-duplex mode and the computer is in half- duplex, you'll see slow speeds and lots of collisions listed in your ifconfig output.
The classic symptom of this problem is pinging works fine, but larger transfers stall or go very slowly. Sometimes the slow performance is only in one direction.
I've seen cases where auto-detection simply failed for some reason and I had to manually set it. This was more common five or six years ago because there were still a fair number of switches around that didn't support auto-detection and had to have duplex settings configured manually, but a driver bug could still cause it today.