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Wired network speed is very slow
Problem
At my new place I got a new machine. I installed Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10 on it. Under Windows everything was OK. However, under Ubuntu my network connection was awfully slow. I could update my machine with 80 KB/sec. Downloading Eclipse took 30 minutes.
Solution
It was clear that there was a problem with the system settings or there was a bug in the network driver. It turned out it was the latest.
Find out the exact type of the network card. I knew it was Realtek:
$ lspci | grep Realtek 06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06)
After doing some research, I found the solution here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=80757. This article states that the driver must be patched for the 3.0 kernel. As I noticed, the current version of the driver works fine with the 3.0 kernel series.
Steps to follow:
- Download the Linux driver from here.
- Extract it somewhere.
sudo ./autorun.sh
That’s all. If you upgrade your kernel, you might have to repeat these steps.
Explanation
“The Realtek r8168B network card does not work out of the box in Redhat, Centos, Fedora, or Ubuntu: instead of loading the r8168 driver, modprobe loads the r8169 driver, which is broken as can be seen with ifconfig which shows large amounts of dropped packets.“
Disable IPv6
First I thought that the network was slow because of IPv6. I tried to disable it but it didn’t change anything. Here are some links though that could be useful once:
