Feisty on Dell Optiplex 745

[Steven Heimann]

I just installed Feisty on my new work desktop, a new Dell Optiplex 745.

Wow - how easy can it get.  Everything just seemed to work.  

Unfortunately now I am having some problems.  I think it is the onboard
ethernet.  It has a Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5754 Gigabit
Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02) (as reported by lspci) which uses the tg3
module.

I am getting connection reset by peer errors.  At first I thought it was
an ssh problem because this is where I was seeing the error.  This
causes the ssh session to drop out which is really annoying.  However, I
am also seeing problems with imap where the client (evolution) loses the
connection to the server part way through a send/receive.  I am now
thinking the Broadcom Ethernet is the problem.  It works OK for 10min or
so then has a problem then works for a while longer and repeats.

After a bit of Googling I have tried forcing the card into 100Mb rather
than auto and set Pause autonegotiate off (whatever that is) and speed
autonegotiation off.

This doesn't seem to have helped at all.

Does anyone have any suggestion as to how to solve this problem.

Thank you and regards
Steven