Hi,
I'm using my Efika MX as a backup file server, it has an (externally powered) USB HD connected to it and sits on my switch.
The trouble is it regularly drops network speed and when it drops it stays dropped for days at a time.
I only have mii-tool and can force it back to 100Mbps but its a pain. I cant seem to find any information on how to remove auto-negotiation at boot time (is it some setting in /etc/conf.d/net ??)

I would also like to understand why this is happening.. Is it something to do with the network card sharing the USB bus... obviously this machine hits the USB2.0 bottleneck during heavy hard drive use.. could this be what is causing the drop in network link speed?

On a broader note, do any of you guys have some tips/tweaks on how to set this machine up as a file server.. does anyone else use an Efika MX Smarttop to do the same? The electricity bill works out the best for me :) although it seems I need to tweak the samba/network/USB bus bottlenecks to get the best out of it.

I've been lazy to resolve this issue and in reality the little fileserver has been running for 6 months straight with no restarts, these units are really nice, thanks Genesi :)

edit: sorry forgot to mention in the post that I'm running Gentoo (its in the gentoo forum i know :P )

For me it depended on the switch I used. Using a no-name soho router/switch, I had it regularly, even without extreme network traffic. But with my SMC gigabit switch I never had this problem.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/