cable running slower in linux than windows?!??!

[zazoo]

I am having problems with my high speed internet running under red hat 7.1 and i was hoping somebody out there could help me out.
Basically the problem is download speed... for example under a windows ftp connection (with the windows box plugged into the cable modem) my download rate goes at 350k/s (which is normal for my provider). When i attempt the same download from linux (this time with the linux box connected to the cable modem) the download rate is a pathetic 94k/s. I am no expert by any means at tweaking networking in linux, but i do know that it IS capable of running at high speed, because my LAN always runs at at least 3MB /s. it just seems to be the internet connection. But, as i said, when the internet is plugged to the windows machine it seems ok.. does anyone have any ideas???
thanks a lot!!


Zazoo.

 

[leebrownusa]

I'd be checking the simple items first, such as NIC speed and duplex settings. Alot of NIC's are setup to be auto sensing and sometimes that doesn't work right properly.

 

[zazoo]

ok well that sounds like a promising start... how do i verify the settings of the NIC exactly? is it through ifconfig or something else?

Zazoo.

 

[leebrownusa]

The ifconfig could tell you if you are experiencing alot of collisions on this NIC in this machine and that could be important clue to determine if you have a speed/duplex mismatch. I don't believe it will tell you the speed/duplex of the NIC. Not knowing what kind of NIC I would suspect there is a setup program a person could get on a floppy to manually determine and/or manually set the parameters on the NIC. I am not a Linux expert so past that is anyone out there that knows if a conf file in Linux would need adjustment if a user manually set their NIC to 100MB/Full duplex? Sorry I don't have that part of the puzzle.

 

[zazoo]

i'm sure there is a way to manually configure the NIC.. generally in the modules.conf where you introduce the module for the device. problem is i'm fairly certain that the parameters are unique for each driver. like.. a 3com one would be alias eth0 3c0s2 force=2 would force 100mb half duplex or something while another would be alias eth0 duplex=full speed=100
see what i mean?
i'm pretty sure there is something wrong though.. this is what ifconfig reports on the device (after only being online about an hour since last reboot):
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:5A:99:94:C4
inet addr:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:22325 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5564 errors:905 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:904
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100

notice the errors and carrier count. i'm not sure what this signifies. incidentally, the NIC is a Linksys USB100TX using the pegasus module.

Zazoo.

 

[leebrownusa]

This is from the Linksys website:

Network Operating System. The USB 100TX Network Adapter is only supported under Windows 98 and Windows 2000. There are no support or driver available for any other operating system.

Could be a issue under Linux?

 

[silverpig]

Could be that it's unsupported. I've run a number of Linksys LNE100TX network cards with the tulip module, and all have worked perfectly...

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[zazoo]

well many of the manufacturers claim not to support linux with their usb devices, probably because usb wasn't supported (officially) by linux until the 2.4 kernel. The linux info sites however all say that most usb ethernet adapters (including mine, linksys usb100tx) use the pegasus chipset and so can be supported with the use of the pegasus kernel module.

Zazoo.