The Intel D945GCLF (Atom 230) main board has a serious bug in the Realtek gigabit NIC firmware. Any sustained transfer over 100Mbps will eventually cause the NIC to go offline until the network stack is reloaded or machine rebooted. I reproduced the issue in CentOS, Debian, and Windows.
No driver fixes the issue; you have to update the BIOS to the latest version from the Intel website to resolve this.
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