RedHat 9/3Com Ethernet very slow

Hi folks,

I'm new to your listserv and hope that this is an appropriate place 
to ask a question regarding my ethernet card/driver.  If I have 
googled myself down the wrong path, I apologize in advance.

I have a Dell Dimension 4400 on which I have installed RedHat Linux 
9.  This is actually the third installation I have done on this 
machine, all with the same version of RedHat.  And I am relatively 
sure that I didn't do anything different these last two times that I 
did the first time.

But my ethernet connection is painfully slow now, and it wasn't 
during the lifetime of the first installation (not that it matters, 
but the reason I have installed it several times is that I managed to 
get my MySQL installation tied into a pretty good knot, and I didn't 
have much else on the machine so I decided to just wipe it clean and 
start over).  I had the ethernet slowness during the second install, 
and thought maybe I'd erase and reinstall and pay more attention 
during the installation, but that didn't fix the problem.

I am comfortable using Linux, but am not an expert by any means.

I have three computers and a color Laserjet networked in my office 
using a Linksys 10/100base-T switched hub (Model EZXS55W).  Trying to 
connect from my Powermac G5 to the Dell Linux box to copy back some 
tarballs that I moved before erasing the Dell is how I came upon my 
problem.  Using SFTP my upload times were in the neighborhood of 2k 
per second!  However, if I sit at the Dell and download files from 
the internet, it works at the expected speed (150-300k per second).

I tried different ports on the switch, as well as several different 
known-to-be-good ethernet cables, all to no avail.

The switch has two green lights for speed and activity for each port, 
as well as a yellow light that shows collisions and the duplex mode. 
The yellow light is lit for every device except the Dell, which leads 
me to believe that the Dell is running in half-duplex mode.  I am 
also relatively certain that before I reinstalled RedHat both times 
that the yellow light *was* lit for all devices.  I don't understand 
why I would be able to download from the internet at 300k/sec but not 
from a networked computer if that is the case, but perhaps I don't 
understand Ethernet as well as I think I do.  :)

The Linux network configuration tool lists my card as a 
3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado].

I modified the modules.conf file where it listed:
alias eth0 3c59x

And changed it to:
alias eth0 3c59x full_duplex=1

And that didn't help.

I downloaded and complied, from scyld.com, vortex.diag.c and mia-diag.c.

mii-diag reports "No MII transceiver present!"

vortex-diag says "Index #1: Found a 3c920 Series NIC adapter at 
0xdc00." And lists the NIC address.

Again, I'm not a Linux veteran, but my instinct is that there is a 
problem with the ethernet driver for this card, and that is causing 
the problem with the download/upload speed.  If anyone can think of 
any thing I haven't thought of, or knows a better direction in which 
to point me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks for your time (and sorry for such a lengthy explanation).

Mike
-- 
--------------------------------
Michael Greifenkamp
Integrated Pest Management
The University of Illinois
[email protected]
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