I have a rather strange problem. We covered all the obvious hardware related issues (different nic, eth cable and switch) however I cannot seem to stop eth dropping packets.

I have 4 servers all exactly the same.

driver: e1000e version: 1.2.20-k2 firmware-version: 1.8-0 bus-info: 0000:06:00.0

They are all running the latest kernel(2.6.32-5-amd64).

However they do this:

RX packets:17073870634 errors:0 dropped:14147208 overruns:0 frame:0

another server:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr e0:69:95:05:2f:cb
          inet addr:10.10.10.86  Bcast:10.10.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:5455209277 errors:0 dropped:375445 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3666134366 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:6688414486673 (6.0 TiB)  TX bytes:1611812171539 (1.4 TiB)
          Interrupt:20 Memory:d0600000-d0620000

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1b:21:b7:7a:ce
          inet addr:10.10.0.86  Bcast:10.10.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:15473695728 errors:0 dropped:5808325 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:20112364421 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:9192378766434 (8.3 TiB)  TX bytes:20216368266761 (18.3 TiB)
          Interrupt:17 Memory:d0280000-d02a0000

A massive amount of dropped packets.
I have tried to load on the latest driver, 1.9.5. This did nothing.
I'm not sure what else to do.