So guys, my NIC from eBay arrived today. It's a Gigabit card with a PCI input, NOT PCI-e.

 

Plugged it in and started the server - and I couldn't access it. Oh derp, I forgot to disable onboard. No problem.

 

Hauled out my monitor and disabled the onboard NIC through the BIOS. Booted up. Still can't access. Hmm. Oh right, I forgot to set static on the router. Go to router, get to DHCP reservation list, copy the MAC, copy to static, boom, done.

 

Still can't access... NetBIOS was not working. So I had to type in the address manually.

 

Then I got a shock when I saw the Main screen:

 

100 Mb/s, full duplex, mtu 1500

 

How can it be 100Mb/s? It's this card:

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/252237213839?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

 

It's connected via PCI. The onboard NIC kicked out around 10~12MB/s, so I was assuming maybe 20~40MB/s, however this card is only spitting out 1MB/s, when tested with a 2GB movie file.

 

What... does anybody know why my NIC is not working full speed, and not giving out NetBIOS? Thanks.

 

EDIT: To clarify, I was downloading the movie file to my laptop, not uploading the movie file to my server.

It could be a cabling issue as 100Mbps Ethernet needs less wires connected in the cable than 1Gbps Ethernet. A bad router port is also a possibility.

I'll try connecting directly to the router, see if that fixes the problem. I remember our ISP networking guy 'split' our CAT5e cable to provide my room a port.

 

Hopefully this is the problem - if so, I'll have to ask the networking guy to reattach the wires.

@itimpi, you're a genius! I connected directly to my router and now I'm getting this:

 

1000 Mb/s, full duplex, mtu 1500

 

Thank you! Curse the stupid ISP guy. I'll have to somehow splice the wires back up again..

 

EDIT: I'm still getting 1~3MB/s on the transfer.... Something's still wrong. Good news is that NetBIOS is back up.

So after some further troubleshooting, I've seen speeds go up and down. The charts are generally all over the place. I've attached a sample chart.

 

It starts off well - generally going to about 12~15MB/s, which is good. Then it rockets down to 700KB/s and the goes up and down and stuff.

 

I've made sure nobody else is using the server, and this is the only transfer that is happening.

 

Any ideas?

 

EDIT: I've seen the speed hit 22MB/s, so that's good. It's an improvement over the onboard, which capped out at 12MB. However I'm still expecting this card to maintain this speed, not go up and down. Maybe it's a disk problem but I still don't like how it's very unstable.

 

Are you reading or writing? If writing to the parity array, the writes will be slowed by parity. An initial burst is possible due to memory caching but then it will slow down as the disks start being written.

I'll try connecting directly to the router, see if that fixes the problem. I remember our ISP networking guy 'split' our CAT5e cable to provide my room a port.

 

Hopefully this is the problem - if so, I'll have to ask the networking guy to reattach the wires.

You can't really split an ethernet cable so I don't know what exactly was done. Each must have a separate port on each end. The port for your room must have its own port on the router or switch. It is likely that there is just a port connection issue or maybe a bad cable somewhere.

I'll try connecting directly to the router, see if that fixes the problem. I remember our ISP networking guy 'split' our CAT5e cable to provide my room a port.

 

Hopefully this is the problem - if so, I'll have to ask the networking guy to reattach the wires.

You can't really split an ethernet cable so I don't know what exactly was done. Each must have a separate port on each end. The port for your room must have its own port on the router or switch. It is likely that there is just a port connection issue or maybe a bad cable somewhere.

 

Before gigabit Ethernet came along only the orange and green pairs were used. That left the blue pair (which was originally intended for analogue telephone use, and explains the rather strange way the wires are arranged inside the connector) and the brown pair, which could be put to any use the creative mind could devise. I've seen those spare wires used to provide an RS422 connection, or, alternatively, a USB connection, avoiding the need to run an extra cable. It looks as though the IT guy referred to used them to provide a second 100 Mb/s Ethernet which, of course, broke any gigabit capability where all four pairs are required.

 

http://amzn.com/B00009XSZE

 

I've used these in a pinch. Beats pulling a new wire through walls if all you need is 10/100 and you don't want the complexity of adding a small switch.

Are you reading or writing? If writing to the parity array, the writes will be slowed by parity. An initial burst is possible due to memory caching but then it will slow down as the disks start being written.

 

I was reading from the server, so transferring a 2GB video file from the server to my laptop.

 

I've seen speeds go up to 27MB/s, so I know it saturates the network speeds, I just don't get why it won't constantly stay at that speeds.

 

I'll try connecting directly to the router, see if that fixes the problem. I remember our ISP networking guy 'split' our CAT5e cable to provide my room a port.

 

Hopefully this is the problem - if so, I'll have to ask the networking guy to reattach the wires.

You can't really split an ethernet cable so I don't know what exactly was done. Each must have a separate port on each end. The port for your room must have its own port on the router or switch. It is likely that there is just a port connection issue or maybe a bad cable somewhere.

 

He said he used the existing CAT5e cable to make dual connectors. So there's eight mini-cables encased within the ethernet cable if I remember correctly. How he explained it to me was that some of those wires were unused, and were thus free for him to use. Therefore, four of the wires are the main internet connection, and four of the wires go directly to my room. He said once he spliced up the wires like this, I would have slow speeds, unless I opted for him to have an external cable (away from the wall).

 

I'll try connecting directly to the router, see if that fixes the problem. I remember our ISP networking guy 'split' our CAT5e cable to provide my room a port.

 

Hopefully this is the problem - if so, I'll have to ask the networking guy to reattach the wires.

You can't really split an ethernet cable so I don't know what exactly was done. Each must have a separate port on each end. The port for your room must have its own port on the router or switch. It is likely that there is just a port connection issue or maybe a bad cable somewhere.

 

Before gigabit Ethernet came along only the orange and green pairs were used. That left the blue pair (which was originally intended for analogue telephone use, and explains the rather strange way the wires are arranged inside the connector) and the brown pair, which could be put to any use the creative mind could devise. I've seen those spare wires used to provide an RS422 connection, or, alternatively, a USB connection, avoiding the need to run an extra cable. It looks as though the IT guy referred to used them to provide a second 100 Mb/s Ethernet which, of course, broke any gigabit capability where all four pairs are required.

 

John_M, you explained it nicely. I believe this is how it was done.

 

 

I think I'll need to somehow add an external cable to my networking setup in order to get Gigabit networking to my room. There's no use of having a Gigabit NIC if I don't have Gigabit at my desktop.

 

 

I did solve the problem of 100Mb/s lock-in, so now I have to diagnose exactly why the hell my server isn't constantly outputting the speeds. I suspect a hard drive bottleneck, if so, I'll have to test read/writes from the cache drive.

 

Thanks to all who helped me solve this problem!