Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with gigabit

Recommendation for Expresscard Gigabit NIC?

PueExMachina — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:25:22 -0800

Recommendation for Expresscard Gigabit NIC? The card needs to have one gigabit port, fit in a 34 or 54 mm expresscard slot, and support linux. I have laptop that is new enough to use expresscard instead of cardbus but still has a 10/100 network interface. I'd like to add a gigabit interface, but I can't find many for sale online; the ones I can find are poorly reviewed and highly priced. Since none of my usual geek friends have made this purchase, I'm turning to the hive mind to ask for a recommendation. The card needs to have one gigabit port, fit in a 34 or 54 mm expresscard slot, support linux, and ideally cost less than $40 with shipping.

Windows Vista is laughing at me...

cgomez — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:37:02 -0800

Server/network/IT-Filter? Windows Vista keeps, or more specifically explorer.exe drops my network transfers, how can I fix this or what is the best Explorer replacement? Also, how can I make Windows Server 2008 more useful on the small scale (more inside of course) ... I previously asked about a storage array for my personal network and ended getting another computer and converting the old one into a RAID-5 Windows Server box.

Here's what's on the network:

Computer 1: Windows Server 2008, RAID-5 Disk Array (2.3TB usable).
Computer 2: Windows Vista Ultimate (used as a media center/personal computer)
Computer 3: MacBook Pro

All of this is linked up through 802.11n/gigabit ethernet.

Question 1: Windows Vista randomly drops network transfers to the server (explorer.exe). This usually happens when I'm moving 5GB or more of data which is often. Essentially it stops transferring and when I press 'cancel', it locks up and I can't kill explorer.exe from the task manager. The only way to recover is restart.

This is, however, not a problem with Windows Networking. I've tried a different file manager called "Directory Opus" which is great and solves my issue. Network transfers never fail. The issue is the program costs $85 US and I'm not going to steal it :-\. So, does anyone have ideas on how to solve explorer.exe or is there a more affordable file manager/Explorer replacement? Also, I've tried this with and without SP1.

Question 2: I'm using Windows Server 2008 as a storage and print server. I've toyed a bit with the virtualization features but I'm looking to see if there are features that might be useful outside a true-server environment for my setup.

(all software licenses are legitimate, piracy is bad, m'kay)

Mysterious network speed cap on my PC

lattiboy — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:06:27 -0800

There is a mysterious network cap somewhere on my PC, tried everything I know. Okay, so I changed ISP recently because I couldn't seem to get above a 1MB connection. I switched to Qwest 7MBs line, and I still can't seem to get any higher then 1MBs. Here's the odd thing, I installed a PCI Gigabit ethernet card and all of the sudden I am gettting 2MBs, but no more.

I have an ASUS m2npv-vm mobo that uses the Nvidia nForce 430 chipset with gigabit lan and also hooked up a Rosewill (Realtek chipset) PCI gigabit lan. I have uninstalled/reinstalled the drivers numerous times, and reset all BIOS settings to default. I am having the same cap on all web browers and my utorrent application. Any help would be appreciated.

A long TCP tuning question

JulianDay — Fri, 04 May 2007 17:24:09 -0800

I recently bought a new gigabit router and NIC cards and they're not running as fast as I hoped. I recently bought new gigabit Ethernet cards (trendnet teg-pcitxr’s) and a router (a dlink GameLounge).

The cards were installed in my file server running slackware 10.1.0 (2.4.29) and a Windows 2000 computer. There is also an old iMac on the network (the kind w/ the monitor coming out of the half-sphere), which I assume has a 100Mb card.

I’ve been using iperf to see what kind of transfer rates I can get. The results are that it’s fast-ish when the server (iperf –s) is Win (~252Mb/sec) and Linux the client, Pretty slow when the server is Linux (~67Mb/sec) and the clinet Win.

The iMac is the best when it’s the client (~93Mb/sec, I assume it's max) but slower when it’s serving (~67Mb/sec) to either the Win or Linux computers.

From what I could gather through online reading I need to tune my tcp settings.

On the linux computer I tried adding each of these settings in /etc/sysctl.conf and then running sysctl –p.

(from http://www.acc.umu.se/~maswan/linux-netperf.txt)

net/core/rmem_max = 8738000
net/core/wmem_max = 6553600

net/ipv4/tcp_rmem = 8192 873800 8738000
net/ipv4/tcp_wmem = 4096 655360 6553600

(from http://dsd.lbl.gov/TCP-tuning/linux.html)

# increase TCP max buffer size
net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
# increase Linux autotuning TCP buffer limits
# min, default, and max number of bytes to use
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216

On the windows computer I downloaded DrTCP and set the Tcp Receive Window to 65535, tried turning Windows Scaling on. The network card had an advanced setting for JumboFrames. I set that to the max, 7K, and then tried entering 7000 in the MTU in DrTCP. There was a lot of rebooting as I fiddled with all this.

In the end, nothing much changed, and I feel that particular all-drained-out-after-futzing-with-computers malaise.

Is there something I’m missing? I realize this is kind of an open-ended question because the more I read about this the more I realize how complicated it all is, but I’m hoping someone who actually knows about TCP tuning might be able to shed some light on the situation for me.

Why not gigabit?

rathikd — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:45:00 -0800

Why do some networking products have 10/100 ports instead of gigabit ports? Gigabit ethernet nics have been around for a while. Apple has had them standard in their computers for years now. Why does Apple (and other manufacturers) not put gigabit ports in their networking products? In Apple's case the new 802.11n draft Airport Extreme and AppleTV. I assume at this point the cost would be negligible. Or is it more of a push to faster wfi specs?

Manage the unmanageable...

tysiva — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:52:28 -0800

Will an unmanaged gigabit switch slow gigabit devices when non-gigabit devices are on the same network? I recently got an unmanaged gigabit switch because I have a network attached storage box that should be able to work at gigabit speeds with my desktop. However, my laptop only supports 10/100 ethernet. Is my laptop going to slow the connection between the desktop and the storage due to the fact that the switch is unmanaged?

Can't print and use internet simultaneously

Your Time Machine Sucks — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 04:08:00 -0800

Network follies. Airport + wireless ethernet bridge + gigabit switch + printer + Mac + PC = any single network service works until I try to use another one. An apartment and an office are in two separate buildings which are physically right next to one another. The apartment has DSL and an Airport base station.

The office has a wireless ethernet bridge (Moto WE800g) which receives the Airport signal and repeats it to the office via an ethernet cable. The signal tends to be around 30% which is not horrible by 802.11b standards.

In the office, there is a gigabit switch with the following things attached to it:

1. the ethernet cable from the wireless ethernet bridge
2. a Mac
3. a PC
4. a Laserjet

The printer has a manually-entered IP address (past experience has shown that DHCP is an iffy proposition with this ancient beast). The Mac and PC are assigned their IPs by the wireless ethernet bridge via DHCP but they always end up being more or less the same numbers (but if I manually assign them those same numbers, nothing works at all).

Any one network service can be induced to work, but it breaks all the others (i.e., you can print from the PC or the Mac, but you can't print from the PC and use the internet on the Mac at the same time; if you started printing first, the Mac's IP will reset itself to a self-assigned address). I have a spare hub that I'm not using at the moment and that's about the extent of my extra equipment I could bring to bear on this problem. Can I get everyone playing nicely together? Thank you in advance for any help!

Do switches use the fastest route available between computers?

hoborg — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:02:18 -0800

I have 4 Gigabit switches for my network and one 10/100 router. Can/should I hook each switch up to the router and then also plug each switch into each other switch to improve internet performance while still maintaining Gigabit on my LAN?