Not getting gigabit on my office ethernet

There are very specific tools to test cabling, they range from simple continuity testers for under $20 to highly advanced testing tools that costs thousands, even tens of thousands.

But here are multiple things to check...

1) Take the computer (or any computer) to the router and connect it directly to it, do you get gigabit?

1A) Take a computer/laptop with a known working gigbit connection and connect a patch cord directly between it and your computer and check the connection speed, it should be 1000.

3) Check patch cords are at least CAT-5e (CAT-6 is not necessary for Gigabit), verify they have all 8 conductors since it is (was) common especially for inexpensive switch/router manufacturers to include a 4-conductor patch cord. Patch cords with only pins 1, 2, 3, and 6 will only support 100mbps.

3) Check the jack terminations, this is common fault area, especially when done by people who are not properly trained or informed. Structured Wiring How To has a good page on general information on cable termination. This video from Ideal Tools shows how "professionals" do the job.

If you get to this point and everything looks fine, considering the tools you have available, I would do a simple continuity test, make sure each pin has continuity with each conductor having low resistance (14 ohms/100m is typical).

TBH, if after all this things look fine, my next step is to assess the difficulty in replacing the cable... If I can do it in less than an hour or two, I just do it. If it is a wiring "mess" and difficult to replace, I may go back to the shop and get the Fluke meter to see if I missed something obvious.

That being said, I have an HP Probook 650 laptop with Linux Mint and Windows 7 Pro on it, there are some switches out there that Mint will never establish a link to and Windows works fine, and I can't explain that, we have a couple Intellinet Gigabit switches in our test bench for testing devices and for some reason when I boot into Mint it will not connect to the switch and get an IP, but it works fine in Windows but if I connect to one of our infrastructure HP Procurve switches it works fine.

Just a heads-up on this one. I myself ran into this with various cables and such. I found that I could set it manually to gigabit with ethtool but it would reset in a few seconds. Then I checked my tuned profile. If you're using an energy saving tuned-adm profile such as 'powersave' it may be dropping network speed for you. Setting back to something like "network-throughput" immediately kicks in high gear at 1000mb.

Rather than put the whole system in a higher power state, I resolved to create a custom tuning profile from 'powersave' with only the wifi set to powersave:

# /usr/lib/tuned/powersave/tuned.conf
# tuned configuration
#

[main]
summary=Optimize for low power consumption

[cpu]
governor=ondemand
energy_perf_bias=powersave

[eeepc_she]

[vm]

[audio]
timeout=10

[video]
radeon_powersave=auto

[disk]
# Comma separated list of devices, all devices if commented out.
# devices=sda

[net]
# Comma separated list of devices, all devices if commented out. (change this)
devices=wlp1s0

[scsi_host]
alpm=min_power

[sysctl]
vm.laptop_mode=5
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=1500
kernel.nmi_watchdog=0

[script]
script=${i:PROFILE_DIR}/script.sh

Maybe it's a bonehead situation, but hope this helps out someone down the road. Thx