I have a Blueberry Power Mac G3/350 that I use as an iServer (iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb stuff). It’s a great little low-power server that I can stick in the closet—no display necessary—and access via VNC or Screen Sharing.app, but its 10/100 ethernet is a major bottleneck with wired clients. When I saw Office Depot selling Netgear GA311 gigabit PCI adapters for $9.99, I jumped on the upgrade: it’s cheap, it’s automatically recognized by Tiger (no drivers necessary); what more do I need?
Anyway, I install the card in the G3 and problems immediately ensue. To be fair, I had also installed a USB 2.0 card I had lying around and maxed out the RAM, so I stripped it back to its previous configuration, ran fsck -fy in single user mode (which seemed to do the trick), and re-added everything, one piece at a time. Success!
Just one problem: the ethernet card isn’t giving me gigabit speeds. In fact, it’s giving me the same 100 Mbps I was getting with the onboard ethernet. I even tried to force it to gigabit speeds in System Prefs ⇒ Network ⇒ Ethernet, but that only succeeded in rendering the card completely non-functional. (I was eventually able, through trial and error, to get it back by setting it to 100baseTX / half-duplex / Standard MTU, but I have to leave it configured manually; “Configure: Automatically” now leaves it non-functional.)
So… long story for a short question: is there any way I can get this card to work at the advertised speeds? Is the 100Mbps cap just all the G3’s architecture can handle? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
ETA: duh… I can’t believe I was that stupid. The cable was bad.