I purchased a bunch of gb nics to put in the other machines in the glass room, to let them transfer files to the raid at gb speeds. This turned out to be quite a hassle.
First problem, all of the network cards that I bought, Linksys, 3Com and Dlink, all use the same Marvell ethernet controller, which means they use the same driver in linux. The driver is sk98lin or skge, depending on the version of linux. In RH7.3, I got the sk98lin driver compiled and working, but didn’t have any way to check if it was working at gb speed. Turns out, it wasn’t. In SLF3.0.5, I am unable to get the skge driver working at all, so none of the cards work in this version. I bought a different Intel card, that uses the Intel 82541PI ethernet controller and the e1000 driver in SLF305. This card does work, but not at gb speeds.
In looking at the ethernet controllers made by Intel it appears that any ethernet controller that uses the pci bus will NOT work at gb speeds. The limitation appears to be in the pci bus and not the controller. Those controllers that use pci-x or pci-e are able to transfer at higher speeds.
Since none of the other machines in the glass room have pci-x or pci-e busses on them, it is doubtful that these machines will ever be able to use the gb network at full speed.