RTL8111/RTL8168 Network Connection Fix

[pony-tail]

Brand new Gigabyte GA-990fx-ud3 motherboard - Realtek RTL8111 onboard nic . Still having the same (realtek 8111 nics have had this issue since 8.10 that I know of )issue with the nic just completely ceasing sending or recieving after 10 to 15 seconds .
This occurs on 10.04 , 11.04 , and now 11.10 .
The realtek tarball fixes it to some extent ( works for 30 to 45 minutes then stops )
I was wondering is this likely to be fixed anytime soon as ALL of the Motherboards I am looking at to upgrade my old AM2 machines (3 in total ) have this onboard network adaptor .

[dsbig]

I followed the fix and it worked. before the fix I could have a stable internet connection.


thankyou

[dsbig123]

also mods should make this a sticky has it seems to be a fix for alot of people.

ubuntu network connection was slow and unstable and network connection show r8169, replaced it with r8168 and connection was fast and stable afterwards.

only problem is, update the kernel and have to redo the driver replacement

[camera battery]

I use Lenovo notebook, do not know what network card, to be repeated for each boot to access dial-up, how is this going?

[jsheedy]

I am so glad I found this forum post today. This has been driving me crazy for months. depending on the kernel upgrade it could be better or worse, now it just stays up. Thanks for this post, my wife was getting ready to shoot me over this.

[Yudley]

guys I wanted to add one thing (the fix didn't work for me, gigabyte board rtl8111e device, oneiric/11.10 that has kernel 3.0 not 2.x, so I had to do a bit of debugging)

i tried another fix ... it didn't work for me but I made some changes to that and it worked ... following are the changes for this other fix not the one on this thread (maybe I should've posted in the other thread) but some mix-n-match might make it work for this thread's fix too:

the realtek bz2 source file comes with an autorun.sh and src/Makefile (besides other things) ... I had to fix these two files

for autorun.sh I had to change the first line from:

#!/bin/sh

to:

#!/bin/bash

(sh on oneiric points to dash which doesn't understand the autorun.sh syntax)

in src/Makefile I changed line 36 from:

KEXT := $(shell echo $(KVER) | sed -ne 's/^2\.[567]\..*/k/p')o

to:

KEXT := $(shell echo $(KVER) | sed -ne 's/^[23]\.[0567]\..*/k/p')o

cz this line wasn't working for 3.0 (only for 2.5, 2.6, 2.7) ... there's a caveat here though ... the new line would even work for 2.0 and 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 ... the regex needs to be fixed further but for now it's good enough for my 3.0 kernel

[father_ted]

i just been fighting with this ghastly adapter.

i found this note after hours of googling.

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Realtek_8169_driver_problem

so ive enabled wake-on-lan and now the sunofabiatch works again.

i bought an intel pcie nic to replace it as i cant work with my lan randomly disapearing everytime i reboot.

[ladasky]

Brand new Gigabyte GA-990fx-ud3 motherboard - Realtek RTL8111 onboard nic.

Hi there,

And I'm chiming in with my Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD5 motherboard, which is nearly identical, and has the same onboard NIC. My son's upgraded system. It runs both Windows Vista (for which I apologize, but the kid has to have his games) and Linux 11.04, with a 2.6.x kernel.

Out of the box, Ethernet connections were seriously crippled. They would work for a short while, and then time out, in both operating systems. Downloads would generally continue to run if they managed to start, but uploads were typically 10X slower than the other computers in my house, and then would drop out altogether.

Gigabyte wanted me to try another NIC peripheral before doing an RMA. I had to scrounge for one. Who uses them any more?

I was ready to go through the agony of installing the card. But then, a family friend who has spent part of his career in IT tipped me off to the fact that the network drivers that came with Gigabyte's motherboard were likely to be outdated and buggy. Apparently this is a chronic problem with several network chip manufacturers these days. Buggy drivers get released and we're all beta-testers, and woe to the person who does not have multiple computers at their disposal to help diagnose and fix the problem.

Over at the Realtek web site, I found drivers for both Windows and Linux. The Windows driver upgrade worked like a charm!

That emboldened me to try the Linux driver upgrade -- which failed.

You can get the Linux driver tarball here, the name of the current revision is r8168-8.026.00.tar.bz2.

When I uncompressed the tarball to the Desktop and ran the autorun shell script, I got this:

john@GA-990FXA-UD5:~/Desktop/r8168-8.026.00$ sudo ./autorun.sh
[sudo] password for john: 

Check old driver and unload it.
rmmod r8169
Build the module and install
Backup r8169.ko
rename r8169.ko to r8169.bak
load module r8168
FATAL: Module r8168 not found.
Updating initramfs. Please wait.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-11-generic-pae
Completed.
john@GA-990FXA-UD5:~/Desktop/r8168-8.026.00$ lsmod | grep r816
john@GA-990FXA-UD5:~/Desktop/r8168-8.026.00$

I'm not a shell script genius, but something's wrong. Inside the r8168-8.026.00 directory is a directory named src, which contains files named r8168.h, r8168_asf.h, r8168asf.c, and r8168_n.c. Presumably this is where the shell script would look for files? Why isn't it finding them?

Anyway, the inappropriate 8169 driver has been removed (good), but the 8168 driver was NOT installed even though I SHOULD have it. My son's Linux boot has gone from having slow and unreliable networking to straight out nyet-working.

[Bardobrave]

Well... it seems we have a new problem with 11.10 ver and the new kernel 3.0

Before I try the solution from Yudley I'd like to read a bit more about this. Anyone can share any piece of info on the matter?

Thank you.

[praseodym]

Hi,

check this:

http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/la.../#post-3005217

You may want to translate it before

Driver version 026 works with kernel 3.0