On Tue, 2 Jun 2026 19:42:20 +0100 Alice <[email protected]> wrote:
> hello misc. I've been running a Dell 3050 Micro for a while now and for > as long as I've had it I've had the issue of it being extremely > unreliable when it comes to networking. Regularly, multiple times a > day, the network speeds will slow to a crawl (single digit kb/s > typically) or stop working entirely, one time requiring a full reboot. > After some discussion with a friend they recommended seeing if anyone > else was encountering this issue with the 3050 micro or anything else > that uses the Realtek 8168 NIC. I'm only really asking to check if this > is a known issue and if there's anything I can do about it before I go > out and buy a replacement NIC that's known to be reliable. > Thank you all > I've seen this behavior on a 3050 micro (I have three of them) running Linux, but havent tried OpenBSD on those particular boxes. I find it interesting that it sounds like someone else is seeing what I saw - thanks for asking about this. I figured it was just me at the time, since only one of the three 3050's I own was doing it. The other two have been rock solid. In the end, it was some issue with the switch I was directly connecting the 3050 micro to - or at least, once I swapped it out, the problem went away - where everything else was the same hardware on both sides of the equation (same box, same os, same ethernet cable.) iirc, at the time, it was a desktop style metal netgear with 8x 1gbps and 2x 10gbps ports, where the uplink was on 10gbps and the 3050 was connected to one of the 1gbps ports. The other two boxes are on regular 1gbps netgear switches with no fancy fast uplink, but they are the managed kind. Fwiw, I think your solution might also work - and to that end, they make minipcie nics with a ribbon cable and a floating jack that you attach to the back of the micro in one of the prepunched holes. These style of nics are like $25-35 on ebay, and are arguably a much better nic system resource wise/lack of hair pulling/etc. than a usb3 ethernet dongle.
