Free Motherboard.

For months now, I have been dealing with slow transfers over ssh and smb from my home server. When I say slow, I am talking speeds ranging from 16 kilobit to 1 Megabit. Slow for a Gigabit network, slow for any network.

My server runs CentOS 5.3 64bit; Dual Opteron 1.8GHZ 4GB Memory and 8 250GB SATA2 drives in RAID5 with 3 Gigabit Ethernet connections, not a slow machine.

It all started when right after the upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3. Everything had been running smooth and great under 5.2, so naturally I start researching issues with the new kernel version, samba versions, and even new drivers for the NICs. I find a lot of people having issues with the Broadcom NICs on my server board, Asus M2N-LR. Well crap, I’m sick of dealing with the speed issues, so I order a new NIC. Intel ProServer Gigabit NIC. Great support under ANY operating system. Still nothing. Still the same slow speeds.  CRAP ! Thats all I can think. May the upgrade went bad.

So I wipe my server. You have any idea how hard it is to find a way to back up terabytes of data, trust me, its hard. Reinstall CentOS 5.3. Get all my data back on there, all my web sites back up, STILL NOTHING ! ! !  Slow as EVER ! ! ! !

I’m pissed at this point, I have spent hours redoing my server. So I make the CRAZY leap that maybe the mainboard is bad. I Order a new one. $229.99 and 3 days later, I put the board in. SAME FREAKING PROBLEMS!!!

I know its not my desktop systems, they work with other servers, but all on different networks. AH HA ! ! !

See that picture at the top. Yep, that little piece of crap Linksys SD2005 Gigabit workgroup switch was the culprit. Teach me to buy a more expensive switch to use at home, replaced it with a green series D-Link, and everything has been working great since.

You may wonder, what up with the title? I have a Spare Asus M2N-LR in box that I can’t return, so I’m giving it away. Send me a tweet to @feekes with Free Motherboard in it, and you could get it. I’ll even throw in a Linksys SD2005 paperweight.

I’ll pick the person at random in a week, and ship you the board for free.

Thanks.

***Update***

Since I had so few, I mean NO RESPONSES on Twitter, I’ll just give it away at the next tweetup.