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Paté
Asked: 2012-01-17 08:30:56 +0800 CST

Internet is slow & intermittent

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Something kinda weird happened to me today.

I've been using Ubuntu for month on my computer without any issue but today I decided to install Windows 7 on dual boot so that my GF can use Photoshop... Of course I had issue installing windows so I had to hard reboot it.

After doing this, Ubuntu could not activate my network card and failed to connect to my network(rebooting didn't do anything). I had to go back to windows and restart it "safely" in order to fix it.

Now my computer connects back to my network but internet is really slow. DNS resolution takes a long time. Speedtest.net shows a unstable link.

ifconfig shows dropped RX packets.

pate@pepette-i7:~$ ifconfig eth0 eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 50:e5:49:3a:64:b1  
          inet addr:192.168.1.11  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::52e5:49ff:fe3a:64b1/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2261 errors:0 dropped:2261 overruns:0 frame:2261
          TX packets:17701 errors:0 dropped:23 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:2204486 (2.2 MB)  TX bytes:1122744 (1.1 MB)
          Interrupt:42 Base address:0xe000

Using a netbook on the same networks works fine so it's not the router. And going back to windows works fine too so It's hardware related.

I tried to switch to google's DNS, /etc/init.d/networking restart, ifconfig eth0 down, ifconfig eth0 up.

After some testing, local network is intermittent too. If I connect from my laptop to the computer it works but then freeze and I can't type anything in the ssh client.

Don't know what to do now :(

Thanks for reading.

networking

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I wonder if this is driver related somehow. As in, if Windows 7 somehow adjusted a setting on the firmware of your card by installing one of it's drivers. Now, the standard Ubuntu driver is no longer working correctly as a result of this setting change. This is just a theory, but have you tried downloading or installing any "restricted" manufacturer specific drivers within Ubuntu for your particular network card?

    To test this theory, if you can't find Linux specific drivers from the manufacturer, then have a look at trying a configuration using ndiswrapper, specifically ndisgtk. This would theoretically let you use the same "driver" as Windows is using and thus may alleviate your issue.

    To install ndisgtk, in a terminal just do a:

    sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

    Best of luck!

    Update: Seems to be related to your chipset/hardware as listed in the comments below. I did a Google search on "ndisgtk RTL8111" and sifted through to find this link, where someone solved an issue with this same chipset using Windows drivers and ndisgtk. Hope this helps.

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