Description:

My new motherboard has dual RTL8111C LAN controllers on-board. The module that loads on my working Arch installation for this chip is 'r8169', and while ifconfig shows both LAN ports to be UP, neither of them will work using that driver module. The folks at Realtek say that the r8168 driver should be used instead, and they provide a driver from their site:

ftp://202.65.194.212/cn/nic/r8168-8.006.00.tar.bz2

However, I've been unable to get it to compile successfully. Web searches show that many others are having this same problem, while the r8169 module seems to work for some, at least partially.

A fresh Arch installation using the 2008.6 FTP installation also failed due to lack of the r8168 module.

I'm thinking this is a bug because while your system says you have a working network connection, you really don't. This happens with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.


Additional info:

It's my understanding that some distributions have overcome this issue and the controller is now working with their latest kernels, but I'm not sure how they went about fixing it. I have started a thread on the forums about the matter, hoping that someone can help to get me up and running:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=51634


Steps to reproduce:

Install Arch on a motherboard using the rtl8111c controller, and you'll see that the installation routine tells you that the necessary module is loaded, and your LAN ports are up and working, but then you can't connect to any FTP sites to download packages and complete the installation. This can also be reproduced on an already working system when moving to the rtl8111c controller.