gigabit data transfer with GA311 mandrake 10.1 - 9.0

Hi im hoping someone can help me out.
I have installed an additional GA311 network card in my mail server and backup mail server. The idea is to speed up the rsync that runs over night to sync /var/spool/imap on both.

The mail server is mandrake 9.0 and the backup server is mandrake 10.1. I have installed rtl8169_8110S_linuxdrv on each machine.
and set the cards up with ip addresses 192.168.9.1 192.168.9.2

Now i can transmit data but it is only at a comparible speed to a standard card.

I have tried to lock the speed at 1000Mbs using the
insmod r8169 media = 0x10 command contained in the driver readme file. however when run on the 10.1 box i get the error

insmod: can't read 'r8169': No such file or directory

and when run on the 9.0 box i get the error

Using /lib/modules/2.4.19-16mdk/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.o
insmod: a module named r8169 already exists

If anyone has any pointers i would be grateful.

Thanks Shaun

I believe you should add your special module parameter 'media=0x10'
to the r8169 line in /etc/modprobe.conf to cause it to always be passed
to the r8169 kernel module.

hi martouf
thanks for your suggestion. i followed and now both cards are forced set at 1000Mbs. But still when i do an scp between boxes using these cards i only get about 10MBs??
any ideas as to what could be wrong? im just using a standard cable not a crossover could that be the problem?

anyway thanks again for your time.

Hi willisbruce,

GBit over copper spec demands CAT-6 cables. I don't know what distance you are covering, but CAT-6 cables are available off the shelf in various lengths.

When you run over plain CAT-5 the spec calls for the interface to fall back to 100 Mbps.

HTH
Bill