I'm reposting this in a new thread instead of continuing to derail the other.
Ok. Full and complete story:
I'm the IT guy for a department of about 500 in a company over 50,000. Network infrastructure is controlled by the network department of which I'm not part of. I have the following machines allocated to me:
Mac Pro - Purchased 11/06 as my main desktop and primary workhorse (quad core)
MacBook Pro - 15" Purchased 5/07 as my main laptop
Mac Mini - 166ghz Purchased 5/07 as a test machine
Dell Inspiron 6400 - Purchased this year as a test machine for OS's (currently running XP)
Dell PowerEdge SC1420 - Purchase data unknown, primary test server
IBM Thinkpad R51 - Purchase date unknown, loaner laptop
I have two data ports at my desk both attached to the same network switch of which all I know is it's a 10/100 cisco. Every single one of the machines above will connect to this switch on either wall port at 100 full duplex except my mac pro. It only connects at half duplex using either nic. If I force it to 10 or 100, full or full with flow control, I do not get an IP address from the dhcp server. Obviously I thought there was something wrong with the mac pro so the first thing I did was put in a fresh drive and reinstall OSX. That didn't make any difference, so I called Apple. After ninety minutes on the phone with them and no luck, they had me plug my mac pro directly into my macbook pro using a straight through cable (which I didn't even know was possible, I would have thought I'd need a crossover cable) and it connects and communicates at 100 full and 1000 full (obviously gigabit doesn't do half). Thus they concluded that the problem is the switch and not my mac pro. Since I can connect full with five other machines using the same cable, networking insists it's a problem with the mac. There's only one switch in this department to connect to but I am considering taking it to another building to see what happens, I just haven't had time.
So here I am, needing to transfer large video files back and forth between the live server and my mac pro but I'm forced to use a firewire drive to do it.
Other than putting a new NIC in my mac pro, I'm out of ideas and open to trying anything.
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Peeb suggested trying a new switch, which was the plan, I just hadn't had time to take it to another building until today.
So I plugged my mac pro into a completely different switch in another building entirely and have the same result. I cannot get full duplex no matter what I try.
The switches in question are: Cisco WS-C4006 and Cisco WS-C6500.
Apple continues to blame the switches for my connection issues and networking isn't going to replace them because of one machine out of 200 that has a problem.
So I'm still looking for a PCI Express NIC that will work in my mac pro.
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