I'm running SuSE 9. I have a Compaq Presario 2575US laptop and am using the 10/100 NIC to connect to my router. I have two other desktop PC's running M$ on my lan that I use for file storage. The problem I'm having is that I can't figure out how to get the full bandwidth out of my NIC in the laptop. The router is 10/100 compatible and the M$ machines are set to 100 bit half duplex and do transfer close to full speed between them. The NIC in the laptop is using the natesemi driver, model is: Hewlet-Packard Co DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller. I have only been able to achieve 5.3mbs as a max when transferring files between the network machines and the laptop. I'm running with KDE 3.1 and mapping to the M$ machines with LinNeighborhood. When I transfer files I go my /home/mnt dir and open the share I want to push/pull from, then I'll drag the files or folders and copy or move.

I'm assuming there is some option I can add to the hardware config to open it up to 100bit but I'm stumped with what to type in. I think this is similar to using an older 3M card in M$ where they will set hardware default to 10bit, you have to manually select 100bit.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I guess this isn't as simple a question as I thought it was. Does anyone know what type of options can be entered to the modules.conf file to enable 100baseT?
mode=100BaseT, media=100BaseT ?

Any suggestions?

This may not be related to the card. But to check try ethtool . Not sure if it is distributed with suse but im sure its available as an extra.


ethtool eth*

You may also be able to set speed and duplex with ethtool.

-Matt

Thanks for the help, ethtool was loaded with the distro. Now I'm confused, when I ran #ethtool eth0 it shows;
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
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: 15
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: pumbags
Wake-on: ub
SecureOn password: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Current message level: 0x000040c5 (16581)
Link detected: yes

I did use the -s option to set the auto-negotiation to yes, it was set to no. Where I'm confused is what in addition I should maybe check. As you see above, the NIC is set to 100Mb/s already. When I monitor transfers with IPTraf it shows the Activity at 10000 - 12000 kbits/sec, if I check the networking in task manager on the XP box it confirms that the transfer is right around 10Mb/s. Are there any daemons or settings that could be bottlenecking or throttling the connection to 10?