Packet drops in Ubuntu and Fedora with Realtek NIC driver r8169

The Problem
I recently purchased a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3 motherboard, installed Ubuntu and started to download eclipse.  The download took forever!  Tried to open a few websites and some of them just timed out.  I was just about to get on the phone with the ISP when I noticed doing a ping the router some packets where being lost!


The solution
The motherboard comes with a Realtek network card running the r8169 chip.  Now for some reason Ubuntu and Fedora detects this as a r8168.

To check this run:

lsmod | grep r8168

If you get a output if means your using the r8168 driver instead of the r8169.

Step one is to download the driver required from Realtek
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Once the download is complete extract

tar vjxf r8168-8.tar.bz2

The next step will disable the network interface, remove the r8168 module.

sudo rmmod r8168

Now run the autorun.sh file in the extracted folder

sudo ./autorun.sh

Blacklist the r8168 module form being loaded again you will have to add it to the blacklist

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Add the following line:

blacklist r8169

Update the driver cache

sudo update-initramfs -u

Now to check that everything went according to plan run

lsmod | grep r8168

If you get a output your done and dusted!