Excessive Collisions After FC1 Installation

[Christopher A. Smith]

I recently installed FC1 (still a little wary of FC2) on a workstation and
a laptop.  Both had previously been running RH 9; FC1 was installed by
paving the hard drive and installing from scratch.  Immediately after the
upgrade, I noticed a surge in Ethernet collisions and a corresponding
decline in network throughput and usability on both systems.  Anything
that involves reading or writing more than 64k or so -- e.g., NFS work,
web browsing, Fedora updates -- results in collisions, and network
activity comes to a screeching halt for several seconds.  Removing NFS all
together and working entirely off of local disk makes no difference.
(Didn't think it would, but it was worth a try.)

The workstation has an Intel EtherExpress Pro 100+, and the laptop has the
MiniPCI version of the same.  Different cabling, different ports on the
switch (and no one else is having problems).  The problem has existed with
the 2.4.22-1.2115, 2174, and 2188 kernels; I haven't been able to get any
versions beyond that because of this collision problem.  I've tried both
Donald Becker's eepro100 driver and Intel's e100 driver -- no difference
on either system.  Recompiling the kernel for options specific to the
hardware hasn't helped.  The only thing I haven't tried, now that I think
about it, is compiling the Ethernet driver directly into the kernel
instead of as a module, but I'd be shocked if that actually made a
difference.

Both systems had been running RH9 with the exact same hardware, and
collisions were never a problem.  The laptop dual-boots Windows XP Pro,
and its network performance is what I'd expect; there's been no observable
or quantifiable difference in throughput.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on where I should look?
Problems with the driver (either) or its configuration?  Or is this one of
those "Upgrade to FC2 and call us back" situations?

Thanks!

		 --------------------------------------
  Christopher A. Smith          Arlington, VA USA          chris at berzerked.org