December iMac vs. Netgear GS105 hub

[David Mackler]

My sympathies. I have the same hub (now retired to the spare parts  
bin) and it did not behave well either with my Dell nor my Powerbook.  
On the Dell laptop, I had to disable auto-negotiation for the driver  
to make it work properly. On the PB, I had to set the ethernet  
manually to 100 Mbps, full-duplex (no flow-control, no nothing) in  
System Preferences. That would make them both work at home with that  
hub, but manually forcing driver settings took the portability away  
from both laptops.

If you really want to make that hub work, you might want to try the  
above tweaks. It may be a better investment of your time and money to  
replace the hub with another brand.

Taking inspiration from Dan, the hubs they give away in boxes of  
cereal are worth every penny you pay for them and not a penny more :-)

HTH,
David

On Mar 2, 2007, at 4:45 PM, Tom M.Blenko wrote:


I have an iMac purchased in December, 2006 and plugged into a hub on  
my local network. I'm not happy for two reasons:

	1. File transfers run consistently at 1-2Mb/s via the hub to a dual  
G5 on the same network
	2. The activity light at the hub blinks constantly (at a speed I  
associate with 10/100 transfers)

Routing is being done off an Airport Extreme that is also plugged  
into the hub (and whose activity sometimes appears to correlate with  
that on the iMac). Aside from the speed, traffic seems to go on and  
off the machine just fine.

The hub has been in service and working without incident for a couple  
of years with three of four machines plugged in, including the iMac  
this one replaced and two other Apple boxes. I've switched ports for  
machines on both ends of the sftp. The network interface on the iMac  
is set to configure automatically in System Preferences. I've also  
tried it with IPv6 both on and off. I see the activity at the hub  
even when Network Utility shows no packets moving on the interface.  
If I crank up some activity, the packets move and the Network Utility  
shows them just fine. If I plug the iMac directly to the dual G5, I  
see 100-200Mb transfers, which is (a little better than) what I  
expect via the hub.

AppleCare has been utterly unhelpful. They say that when iMac is  
plugged back to back with the dual G5 there's nothing wrong, so it's  
not a problem with the machine or its configuration. They want to  
blame the hub. No response when I ask how I'm supposed to use this  
machine in a networked environment, whether the iMac is certified  
with this or any other hub, whether there are any known  
incompatibilities. "Talk to Netgear". Search at Netgear knowledgebase  
("iMac incompatibitilities") turns up one hit which appears not to be  
relevant.

I'd be interested in hearing any ideas. I can't even run backups this  
machine due to the speed issue.

	Tom