“I did shop around for cheaper alternatives, however this seems to be the best in terms of price and number of ports. I didn't want anything fancy, just something to connect my Pi Zero to an ethernet cable with, so it's perhaps more than I need, but very convenient to be able to order everything from Pimroni.”
“I was getting intermittent dropouts on LAN connections, which turned out to be a known problem in the r8152 drivers in debian / raspbian (and other distros). What you get is random dropouts and dmesg entries:
[ 125.855442] r8152 1-1:1.0 eth0: carrier off
[ 128.564423] r8152 1-1:1.0 eth0: carrier on
[ 130.396088] r8152 1-1:1.0 eth0: carrier off
[ 133.107800] r8152 1-1:1.0 eth0: carrier on
[ 148.125673] r8152 1-1:1.0 eth0: carrier off
[ 150.963953] r8152 1-1:1.0 eth0: carrier on
I fixed it using ethtool / forcing the config in the network switch. Details are on the pi forums here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=242964”
