Network lockup during heavy load

Since karmic, the Realtek drivers for the 8169 card have become borked. If you try and copy large amounts of data your machine will hang and require a hard reset.

I got this solution from here;

1) Check to see if the r8169 module is loaded

lsmod | grep r816
r8168 41104 0
-> lspci -v
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03)
Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Device 8168
Kernel driver in use: r8169
Kernel modules: r8169

2) Download the official Realtek driver
Realtek RTL8111/RTL8168

Update: I'm using the 8.017 driver but the current driver on that website is 8.018. It is possible that this version contains the same regression fault that causes this lock up behaviour as I experienced trouble after installing it. If you have trouble, download the older driver from here and add a comment to this post.

3) Remove the r8169 module

rmmod r8169
mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko ~/r8169.ko.backup

(Note: the ` is a backtick, it is not an apostrophe or single quote )

4) Build the new r8168 module for the kernel

bzip2 -d r8168-8.009.00.tar.bz2
tar -xf r8168-8.009.00.tar
cd r8168-8.009.00
make clean modules
make install

5) Rebuild the kernel module dependencies

depmod -a
insmod ./src/r8168.ko

6) Remove the r8169 module from initrd

mv /initrd.img ~/initrd.img.backup
mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`

7) Add r8168 module to /etc/modules

echo "r8168" >> /etc/modules

Reboot, You are done!