Re: [gentoo-user] How to determine if a NIC is playing gigabit?

[Stroller]

On 21 Jan 2010, at 22:45, Mick wrote:

> On Tuesday 19 January 2010 01:28:07 Keith Dart wrote:
>> === On Mon, 01/18, Stroller wrote: ===
>>
>>> I'm not ruling out the cable, because it's pretty beat up (but the
>>> switch *is* lighting up as 1000), but how do I determine, please,
>>> that the Linux server at the other end is recognising the NIC and
>>> negotiating as gigabit speeds?
>>
>> ===
>>
>> ethtool eth0
>>
>> emerge ethtool if you don't have it.
>>
>> Not all chips/drivers support the ioctls necessary to report that,
>> but
>> most recent ones do.
>
> You can also run good ol' lshw.  It'll show you what it has
> negotiated with
> the switch:
>
> configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver= [snip ...]
> multicast=yes port=MII speed=100MB/s

Thanks to you both.

Either of those are exactly what I was originally looking for. Both  
show the interface at 1000Mb/s.

I must have overlooked Keith's reply amongst all the others - some of  
those mention other ways to diagnose the problem, and I haven't  
replied to them yet because I haven't had a chance to try the things  
they suggest. I've been really busy this week.

What I did find time to do was try copying the same files between my  
laptop & my desktop. The files were 23gig and took about 2 hours 40  
minutes, I think, when I copied them from the server to my laptop.  
Testing between my laptop & my desktop they went in about 25 minutes.  
This was using Samba for both tests. Ironically, using the native  
Apple AFP protocol was slower (about 40 minutes) but still nowhere  
near as slow as the original copy from the server.

I'm pretty sure now that the bottleneck is my Linux Samba server or  
the 2' of cable from it to the network switch in the server cupboard.  
I'll double check this as soon as I can and then start proper  
diagnostics. Some of the suggestions made (e.g. netcat) look really  
useful - I'll let y'all know how I get on.

Stroller.