Locking it to 10/full was what the MCI technician recommended after I opened a ticket because the line was dropping to 500Kbs up/down. This was a 4Mbit up/down line burstable to 10. They said it was not possible to increase the capacity of this line, so I guess they are using their old 10Mbit equipment for this. Since locking it like they asked speed has been fine,
OK, it wasn't clear that you were talking about a specialized circuit delivered from a telco.
BTW, this phrase "the line was dropping to 500Kbs up/down" implies that there was some protocol synching taking place that negotiated the speed at that level (like a dsl line). It would be more accurate to type "my observed throughput was only 500Kbs up/down."
and the cable is a 2 meter factory made one plugging into the datacenter patch-panel, so I don't think that's a problem...
My reference to the cable was for a situation where we're talking about a real local area network, where you might have a central switching fabric and machines distributed perhaps throughout a building and was meant to apply to the cable run from the main switches to the openser box.
So, now I don't get your set-up... when you typed "I had to lock-down the network card to 10mbit full-duplex" and then the bit above about the MCI technician and the 4Mbit circuit etc. then this sounds like you have a box running openser that is directly plugged into a metro-lan-style connection that is hardcoded at the provider end to 10/full.
And yet, when you type "datacenter patch-panel" this implies that there is a local area network which implies some sort of central switching fabric and then when I consider "old 10Mbit equipment" together with the phrase "datacenter" my jaw hits the ground...
Where is your server?
Thanks, -mark