While I was installing Fortnite, I noticed the download was very slow. I ran the Speedtest utility from Ookla and the speeds were indeed slow (6.78Mbps download and 7.67Mbps upload). Faster than when I had wifi service, but too slow for fiber. When I ran the speedtest on the Hack1 running Win10, my speed was 456.45Mbps download and 119.78Mbps upload. I booted the Hack2 into Linux Mint so I could check the ethernet controller. The speeds I got in Linux Mint were very poor too. I was able to determine that there was an issue with ethernet port 14 on my DLink DGS-1216T switch that the Hack2 was plugged into. I plugged the ethernet cable from the Hack2 into port 12 on the switch and I was able to get good numbers. I got speeds of 445.90Mbps for the download and 228.89Mbps for the upload. When I booted the Hack2 back into Catalina, the numbers were in the same range (459Mbps download and 224 upload). I checked out the rest of the ports on the switch and determined that ports 5, 9, and 14 were a bit flaky. Ports 5 and 9 were stuck at 100Mbps while port 14 was stuck at 10Mbps.
The DLink DGS-1216T switch is about 15 years old and is now discontinued. But DLink still has a support page for it on their website. I was able to download the user manual, the last few firmware releases, and the SmartConsole utility. The SmartConsole Utility is only available for Windows. When I first started the utility up, it couldn’t find the switch. I noticed that there was another program called SmartServer.exe in the folder. After I ran the SmartServer.exe program (which opened in a command window), I started the SmartConsole Utility. I was able to press the Discover button in the SmartConsole Utility and it found the DLink DGS-1216T. The reason that I wasn’t able to find it before was that it wasn’t on the same network that I was running. I changed the ip address and gateway settings to match the correct network. I determined that the current firmware that I was running was 4.10.06 and the last available firmware for the switch was 4.21.02. The SmartConsole Utility also verified the issues with the ports that the ports lights indicated. After looking at the release notes, I decided to go with the next to last firmware release (4.21.01). The last release doesn’t allow you to downgrade the firmware if you need to for some reason. Once the firmware had been updated, I had to change the ip address and gateway address again because they were set back to the default. I was able to access the router from the browser to check on the ports. The 3 ports that were having issues, were fine now. Port 4 has a device attached to it that uses 100M Full, but the port tested out at 1000M Full. A firmware upgrade can do wonders!
