[ubuntu-uk] Network problems Realtek 8168 card

[Rob Beard]

Hi folks.

I wasn't sure if anyone was aware of this so I figured I'd post about it.

I've recently upgraded my PC with a new CPU and motherboard (MSI P35 
Neo2-FR with Pentium Dual Core E2160).  Before I upgraded I was able to 
stream videos using Samba to my XBOX perfectly, however after the 
upgrade the streaming appeared to stop after about a minute.

At first I put it down to not reinstalling Ubuntu (I had a 32-bit 
installation, and it wasn't recognising that I had 4GB memory in there, 
it was only picking up 3.3GB).  So I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 
7.10 AMD64.

The installation went through fine, everything appeared to work okay but 
I still had this issue with the network.  Browing the internet was fine. 
  I couldn't work out at first what we wrong (I tried running an fsck on 
the drive, and it came up okay).

After a bit of searching this morning I found that a few people have 
been having issues with these Realtek on-board network cards.  It seems 
that Ubuntu is using the RTL8169 driver rather than the RTL8168 driver 
which works but not very well.

The solution to this was to download and compile the Realtek drivers 
(which are infact GPL'd :-).

There's a post on the Ubuntu forums about the issue here: 
http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=671614

I figured it may come up again (I didn't expect the driver to be causing 
these issues), so if you're like me and have a motherboard with a 
Realtek 8168/8111 Gigabit network adaptor on board then you might be 
worth trying the other driver if you see any funny issues like this.

Rob