Gigabit ethernet on laptop

[Tannin]

No big deal this one, but I thought someone might have a quick & easy fix for me.

Seeing as my IBM laptop has gigabit ethernet already, I thought I'd buy a little 5-port gigabit hub and a gigabit card for my desktop at home - it has all those nice fast SCSI drives in it, so why not make the most of them?

So I bought:

* Surecom 5 port switch
* Surecom EP-320G-TX1 PCI card (Realtek chipset).

The card works fine. The hub works fine. The laptop fails miserably.

I can plug in the Smoothwall and it connects. I can plug in the desktop and it connects. But whenever I plug the laptop into the gigabit hub, Windows says "cable disconnected" and the hub doesn't light up. The other two machines work fine, the laptop doesn't exist. No lights, nuffin.

It is not the cable: I tried 3 known working cables, and just for good measure tried one of them between the gigabit desktop card and the gigabit hub. This worked just fine.

The laptop works perfectly on both of the ordinary 100Mbit hubs I've had it plugged into today, and now that I've disconnected the gigabit hub and gone back to the old one, it goes fine.

Any hints? Does the IBM need specially certified cables or something?

(PS: if it's too hard, I won't worry. 100 megabit was working fine. But it would be nice to fix it.)

 

[P5-133XL]

Make sure all of the settings in the advanced properties of the network card in the Device manager are set properly. Some Gigabit Network cards have tons of properties that can be mis-set "causing intense pain, profuse sweating, difficulty in breathing, loss of conscious, and finally death".

Anyone - Can you find where the quote came from?

 

[Tannin]

Thanks Mark. I'll try that. At present it's just factory defaults all the way. I haven't touched it.

But I don't think I'll try it tonight, as I'm knee-deep in looking at Tim's interesting CSS problem in another thread. I'll come back to this when I get tired of reading code.

 

[Howell]

Could be a bad port on the new switch. It happens.

Mark,
Airplane (1977?)

 

[Tannin]

Thanks Howell, I tried several, including at least one that worked OK on the desktop with same port and cable.

Could it be that the IBM laptop (Intel NIC) is fussier about cable quality than the cheapo Realtek card is, and doesn't synch up? Or is it supposed to just drop back to a lower speed in that case? I am just using the ordinary cables that I have lying around at home. (Cat5? Cat 5e? No idea, they are just cables.)

Mark, the IBM NIC has about 20 settings, most of which I don't understand. Are there any in particular I should look at? The obvious one is link speed & duplex, which is currently set to the factory default, auto detect.

 

[Fushigi]

Also try setting the laptop to gigabit full duplex instead of auto detect. Some switches & cards don't play with each other very nicely and a forced speed might help. We've actually had to do that with big buck servers and Cisco switches so I'm not even talking consumer-level gear.

- Does the switch support 10/100/1000? If so, the IBM should at least be auto-negotiating 100. In fact, if forcing 1000/Full fails as above, try forcing 100/Full.
- What grade is the cable? If less than (probably) CAT5E it could still be a cable situation as the IBM might be sending a signal that's a little weaker than the desktop.

 

[Tannin]

No problem.

Alice Cooper, Black Widow off (I think) Welcome to my Nightmare. A guest artist did the voice over - Vincent Price, I think it was.

(Hoolie doolie! How did I ever remember that? I just astonished myself. Not only have I not heard it for 30+ years, the only times I ever did hear it were also, as it happens, the times when I was busy getting totally off my face on whatever chemical seemed to most interesting at that particular moment. (Which, generally speaking, was all of them.) I suppose there is something to be said for wiping yourself out to the point where all you can do is lie down and stare at the psycadelic patterns racing across the ceiling and listen to music. Hey - nothing else you can do, so I guess you remember the words!)

 

[Mercutio]

Silly question, but does the cable you're using actually support gigabit? If you're using vanilla cat5 to do gigabit, that might be the cause of your problem.

 

[Mercutio]

Whoops. I missed the line about trying different cables. Just ignore me, then.

 

[P5-133XL]

Yes, that was Vincent Price doing a bit on Alice Cooper's Welcome to my Nightmare on the specific song Black Widow. In the early 70's it was my favorite Album.

I did say lots of different choices. I can only say that you need to work on your industry acronyms.

When I've had difficulties with Gigabit then I tried to make the most conservative choices possible: i.e. everything off and all numbered settings stay the same (the various number of buffers and the like). That generally works. Then, if I want to feel adventurous, I start slowly adding them back in (with setting I think should work), till failure occurs: the fiddle factor.

 

[MaxBurn]

On my laptop there is a power saving function that disables the gigabit port when you are not using the laptop and requires that there be a management app installed to turn it on all the time. Try plugging it in and shutting down then powering on the computer with the ethernet plugged in.