My desktop keeps losing internet. I’ve had it drop out completely a few times and sometimes it comes back at 100mb instead of 5gb.
When I first installed Win11 this was happening constantly. It was hard to download new software when the download would pause for up to a minute at a time and then resume slowly or with constant reconnects.
This persisted even after installing all of the FW drivers from their auto-installer.
Finally I discovered that the Realtek driver was over a year old so I went to the Realtek site and downloaded the latest autoinstaller. I now have a driver released this past July from an auto-updater that was dated early September, so I feel like I’m fairly up to date.
Ethernet got much better, but I was still having massive lag in games and sometimes they’d freeze. I later was downloading some software in steam and noticed it was poking along at 90mb/s. I checked my network stats and my machine is connected at 100mbps speeds sure enough.
Is the Ethernet Adapter set to auto negotiate or set to 1000 Full Duplex? I would reset the Adapter settings to default settings (auto negotiate) and reboot and see if the helps. Also try a different Ethernet cable just to rule out a bad cable.
Will try another cable. It must be auto negotiating because if I get desperate and reboot it comes back at 5gb and only after some disconnects does it find itself at the lower rates.
(Was thinking of swapping the cable earlier, but forgot to try it…)
One of the reasons I think it might be software based is because it was originally really really unstable on the drivers that Win11 (and the FW driver updater) installed to the point where it took forever to get through the 5MB download of the Realtek drivers. After updating those drivers it’s mostly stable, but still bogs down after a while.
I did power cycle a few things a couple of times for good measure as I reconfigured things to put it on my 10gb switch, and it’s connected to a full network of Ubiquiti smart switches so I can monitor its connection and all of the upstream links and make sure they’ve registered it at 5gbs when it first connects.
In my more recent experience with Realtek NICs all that driver updating and fiddling around with settings does absolutely nothing, it is just a waste of time - I got the impression the newer Realtek NICs are very sensitive to cable quality and to aging cables, even though I’m only using 1Gbit and the old cables are at least Cat6 they turned out to no longer be good enough after 5-10 years.
Also turned out that Cat7 cables from a specific manufacturer who is using rather crappy connectors are not good for more than 1-2 years.
I’ve now made it policy that at the first happening of sporadic disconnect and reconnecting at 100mbit I replace the connecting cable with a new Cat7 one (bought within the last 2 years) and I have yet to encounter that this didn’t solve the issue.
Planning on getting a brand new cable tomorrow. I swapped it to one in my “buncha cables” drawer and that one seems to be a little better. I ran a ping logger for a couple of hours and there were no dropped packets to the router, but a few (<10) to a couple of internet hosts, so it does seem better, but I’d prefer to leave it running all night and see what the stats say.
My switch is 10gb so I can’t set it to the max speed that supports, but I could try to hard-code the adapter to 5gb. Since the other cable seems to have been stable for a couple of hours I want to first try a brand new cable, though.
I was waiting to install Linux until I was sure the hardware was working well just because I am more familiar with Windows, but it would make a good double-check step.
Still, an opportunity to have to drop by a computer parts store tomorrow seems to be the emotionally winning move…
This could explain what I’m seeing. The cable was used previously in another part of my network, but when I shifted things around I replaced it with a much shorter cable just because I could. It never caused any problems in its previous use (though I only have a few devices >1gbe) and I don’t think it was abused in the meantime, but it did sit for a few months in a drawer and it is probably about 3 years old. It is Cat6 and only about 7 feet long so it isn’t out of spec.
It’s possible to boot Linux from USB without installing or can install to an external USB drive/stick (Fedora should work or maybe even better Fedora nightly builds of 43 beta or Rawhide).
because I am more familiar with Windows
Happy to help with Linux. Feel free to PM me if needed.
Beelink GTR 9 Pro owners also experienced NIC issues. Someone mentioned limiting the power usage helped (details here) . I don’t think it’s the same reason here because GTR9Pro uses Intel NICs (to be honest I lost confidence in Intel NICs after their problems with 2.5gbps NICs). Still worth a try.
As are the cables I removed from service, none of them had physical damage or were ever misused, I bought them new myself, and their spec was comfortably higher than what GBit should need.
Also I’ve seen those issues with newer NICs only, I’ve been using Gbit since 2004 with mostly Realtek but also some Intel.
I thought that was only a thing with speaker cables?
Definitely stay away from any alumin(i)um crap cables, also known as CCA - that really would be saving in the wrong place.
Very good point about cable quality some of these newer adapters have overly sensitive controllers and slightly variance in degraded cable quality could lead to inconsistency.
100mbit is the fastest common speed that can be done over 4-wire ethernet (there are standards to do more but they don’t seem to be commonly used and implemented in nics), so if your 8-wire cat6 cable had one wire with a break/partial break that may cause it to drop down to 100. Same for having a bad pin on one of the connectors.
I’ve tried 2 other cables now with very few disconnects. I did find a Cat7 cable to try if I have problems in the future, but the Ubiquiti cables I was drawn to are just Cat6. One has been working fine for a day or two now and is honestly pretty reasonably priced for a Ubiquiti product, and I’m etherlighting ready for any future network upgrades.
