ASUS M3A76-CM

[chip33az]

I recently had an odd issue with the above motherboard under Linux and thought I would share in case anyone else encounters something similar.

I set up SageTV on the above motherboard, but had issues connecting to it with the HD Extender. For some reason it would sometimes connect, and other times wouldn't. I also noticed that when I would copy large files to it, the network would just stop and the connection would fail. This was running Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit on both machines (the copy from/to). Because of the issues with the Extender, I decided not to use it.

I did some research later and found that the motherboard NIC was newer than the r8169 driver and therefore was causing some issues. The lspci -v reports

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)

Reports were that I could either install a driver from Realtek and blacklist the current driver, or go to kernel 2.6.31. I installed ArchLinux which has 2.6.31 and the network has been perfect. Copying files from another server to it has been flawless.

I don't know if this information will be useful to many people, but it might save someone time if their network keeps crashing