VIA Mini-ITX + Cisco Catalyst switches = not working

[Quentin Smith <quentins@comclub.org>]

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Hi-

This year, the Tech. Directory at my school decided to upgrade our
switches to Cisco Catalyst switches. Also this year, we've started
deploying VIA Mini-ITX systems as clients. Unfortunately, we're having
lots of problems with network performance on these boxes. Essentially,
there is less than 500 bytes/second throughput, and TCP connections often
die. We've solved this for the most part on the Windows clients by hard
coding the NIC and the switch port to 100BaseTX + Full Duplex.

Well the Mini-ITX I was given to use as our sole Linux server is not so 
fortunate. It is seeing the same problem, but hard coding the speeds does 
not help.

It was working fine for its first month, but this past Saturday we had a
power outage and when I brought everything back up on Monday it started
experiencing the problem we had seen previously on the Windows clients.

I can't paste an ifconfig output here, because there's no way to copy it 
off the machine. Essentially, running "watch -d ifconfig" shows that the 
RX frame errors are increasing faster than the RX packets are. (In other 
words, most incoming packets are detected as frame errors by the NIC.)

I've tried using mii-tool to hard-code the NIC to 100BaseTX-FD, as well as 
the switch port, but often it causes all received packets to be errors. 
The best combination seems to be 100BaseTX-HD on both ends, which at least 
allows me to wget -c files down with lots of retrying.

So, has anyone seen this before? These machines don't have an accessible 
PCI slot, so I can't just add another ethernet card. And I've already 
tried multiple cables and switch ports.

Thanks for your help,
- --Quentin
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