09-01-2016, 07:28 AM
I have DietPi installed now and did some more testing. With both a 6 foot cat6 or 1 foot cat 5, it does negotiate the connection and pickup an IP address from DHCP (first time it took about a minute before it got an IP). However, I experience severe packet loss with both cables. The 1ft cat5 seems like it might be "slightly" better. But not enough to call it a workaround. I saw anywhere from 15% to 80% packet loss when trying to ping another local network device using either of these cables. I could not run speedtest-cli script, it would simply throw python errors. I was able to connect to an SSH server on the internet, but just briefly before it spontaneously disconnected. Many times, even name resolution failed.
So a short 1 foot cable does not resolve the problem, nor makes it even good enough to call it better.
Using the "ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full", forcing it down to 100Mb/s, with either the cat5 or cat6 cable gives me 0% packet loss pinging local or internet hosts.
Let me know how the solder reflow goes.
So a short 1 foot cable does not resolve the problem, nor makes it even good enough to call it better.
Using the "ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full", forcing it down to 100Mb/s, with either the cat5 or cat6 cable gives me 0% packet loss pinging local or internet hosts.
Let me know how the solder reflow goes.