help - my 10/100 switch will only run at 10Mbps

[beni]

I have an SMC Barricade router (7004BR) that has a 10/100 switch built-in. I have a server and my laptop both plugged directly into the router's LAN side and can only get 10Mbps for files transferring between them. I use my server as a file server, so this is kind of a significant issue since I don't store any of my big files locally on my laptop but I do need to use them frequently. I've tried setting the laptop and server NICs to 10/100 Full duplex but that doesn't help. I've tried transferring the file by drag-and-drop from the laptop to a shared drive on the server (windows 2000 on both machines) as well as ftping locally from the laptop to the server. Both of them max out exactly at 10Mb.

Anybody have any ideas why my transfer speed is being limited? Oh, also - the server NIC is a netgear FA311 and the laptop NIC is a xircom realport pcmcia.

thanks,
Beni

 

[spidey07]

So if you let the NICs autonegotiate what speed to they netgotiate to? Should be 100/full.

If they negotiate to 100/full and you can't communicate then my guess would be bad cables. Are these store bought or home made cables?

If they don't negotiate to 100/full then try updating drivers on the NIC or setting the NIC to 100/full. Carefull though - forcing the NIC to 100/full and leaving the switch at auto can cause a duplex mismatch...making your 100 meg network run like poo.

 

[beni]

Is there a way to tell what speed they autonegotiate to from windows? Neither of the NICs have LEDs that indicate what speed they're linked at. There's also no way that I'm aware of to tell what speed the router autodetects at, and no way to manually set the link speed for the switch ports. Annoying, eh?

The cables I'm using are store-bought Cat-5...a 50' cable to the laptop and a 7' cable to the server.

thanks again.

 

[spidey07]

the NIC driver should have some kind of control program that tells you. you can also check the NIC properties under network control panel.

Next question - what are the specs on the server and notebook? Maybe they just don't have the juice?

 

[beni]

The laptop is a 400mhz PII with 288MB of ram running win2k sp2. The server is a 400mhz celeron with 128MB ram running win2k. I know these aren't very powerful machines and aren't high-end NICs, so I don't expect to really get a full 100Mbps throughput, but I know that the network is the limiting factor here because I've used a network monitor to look at the bandwidth and it tops out at *exactly* 10Mbps. There's no way that's a coincidence.

 

[beni]

I downloaded and ran a diagnostic utility for the laptop and its NIC autodetects at 100Mbps. The diagnostic utility provided for the netgear will only run in real DOS mode, so I can't run it on the server.

Hmph. Any more ideas?

thanks again.

 

[n0cmonkey]

It tops out at 10megabits or 10megaBytes? If it is megaBytes everything is working.

 

[beni]

It's megabits, as in small b. I don't even think my laptop hard drive could handle 10MB per second transfer, but I sure know it can do better than 10Mb.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< It's megabits, as in small b. I don't even think my laptop hard drive could handle 10MB per second transfer, but I sure know it can do better than 10Mb. >>



Sorry if I offended by asking, its something I learned working tech support for morons

Anyhow, 10mb on a 10mb link would be almost impossible. So your 100mbit link is probably slow. Check for updated drivers, if you have an extra cable try switching a couple of cables. I was getting a slow link between two machines a while back and switched out my cable and it worked fine (until the new cable went bad and I had to get another new cable which Ive been too lazy to install). The first cable was store bought too, so they arent perfect.

 

[beni]

Ok, thanks for the advice. These are cheap store-bought cables, so I'll try replacing the 50' to the laptop with a 3' to see if that helps.

And don't worry about asking the bit/byte question...I understand. The first question I always ask my mother whenever she thinks something is wrong with the computer/vcr/whatever is if it's plugged in or not. That fixes at least half of her problems.

 

[MiniMe69]

usually if you go to the device manager and highlight the network card, you can goto the properties of it and see what speed is listed there. sometimes switches have 10/100 LED indicators...100 the led is on..10 it is off...look to see what the leds say. and also you can try new drivers like the other person said

 

[Hobbzilla]

Okay stupid question.. but is your dsl/cable modem plugged into this to share the internet connection? You know those only operate at 10Mb right? Do the rest of the ports on this autonegotiate regardless of the uplink port ? I dunno.. I don't have one of this boogers.

 

[beni]

Yes, I do have my cable modem plugged into the WAN port on the router....but the switch is isolated from the WAN port AFAIK, and I can't imagine that having a cable modem plugged in would limit the rest of the ports to 10Mb. The SMC documentation for this thing states that it can only do about 6Mbps throughput from the WAN side to the LAN side, which is fine - but I think they'd probably mention it if it were only able to run at 10Mb whenever an external modem is plugged in.

I'm going to go get a short crossover cable to do some testing this afternoon. Hopefully I can figure out what's up.