NIC card connected at 100Mbit

[filosad]

Recently, I did a speed test of my network and noticed that my bandwidth is less than 100Mbit's. At first, I thought it was my provider. When I did the same speed test at the router, I was getting 980Mbit to 1Gbit.

When I logged into mu Untangle server, I saw something that is a bit strange which I believe is he root cause of my problem.

My internal NIC (eth1) is in bridge mode and reporting at 1Gbit.
My external NIC (eth0) is configured as 'addressed' but the reported speed is at 100Gbit.

How can this issue be corrected. Thanks
filosad

[sky-knight]

That's a hardware limitation... it's your box, go sort it.

You can start by verifying the NIC in question is actually a gigabit NIC, you didn't list any chipsets here so we have no clue.

If it is a gigabit NIC, then try replacing the cable it's using.

[jcoffin]

It could be an issue with the auto-negotiation on the switch on the LAN.

[jim1985]

As Rob has suggested, check the cable connected to the port that is reporting as only 100Mbit.

I had this problem happen a while back, turns out I was using a CAT5 cable, absolute bare minimum to at least negotiate a 1Gbit link needs to be CAT5e, preferably CAT6 or higher though.

[filosad]

I am running my appliance off a Dell Optiplex 780 with 10 GB of memory. CPU is a Intel 2 Duo E8400 @ 3GHz. I am using a dual port 1 Gig 9492MT PCI server NIC. Switch is reporting as it being connected at 1 Gbit, but the appliance is reporting at 100Mbit.
Any ideas ?

[jcoehoorn]

That sounds like the cable, but a desktop-class system of that vintage may also be running into PCI lane issues, where even if you resovle the network card problem the motherboard will limit your actual throughput.

[filosad]

I am thinking of swapping out the desktop for a HP ProDesk 600 G1 SFF Business PC. It's a bit newer than the older Desktop system. The HP w/s has 8 GB of memory (DDR3) and a Intel i5 @ 3.2Ghz CPU. I would need a single port PCI NIC for the w/s.
Any ideas if this would work or should I look else where. As far as the cables most if not all are CAT6 or better except for the homeruns that are running into my basement (cat5e).

[jcoehoorn]

For the distances you're likely to find at home, cat5e is just about as likely to connect reliably at 1Gbps as cat6, especially if it's just between the Untangle machine and a modem or switch sitting right next to it. But any category cable can get a stretched wire or poor connection after some use, so it's always worth swapping cables around if you have issues like this.

[sky-knight]

Yeah, patch cables and the plugs they slot into can both be damaged on every single removal and insertion. That gear is relatively dated... so anything can happen here.

I will also point out there's no way on this green Earth that rig is hitting gigabit speeds even if you fix the NIC issue. There just isn't enough bandwidth on that main board to handle 2 gigabit.

But sky... my connection is 1 gigabit! Yeah I know, 1gbit IN, and 1gbit OUT! You need 2gbit of throughput on the router to handle a 1gigabit connection.

[filosad]

If I decide to change h/w, can i just swap the HDD's or do I need to do a new install of untangle ? If I need to do a fresh install, that would require to register my appliance with the cloud, correct ?