Ethernet autonegotiate vs forcing full speed

[Fraser Campbell]

On Friday 25 May 2007 11:06:42 Neil Watson wrote:

> There is debate at work regarding network Ethernet auto-negotiation.
> I'm the newcomer.  Historically they say they had problems with auto-neg
> and their cisco gear (catalist) and now manually set all switch ports
> and server NICs to full/full.   I've never heard of such a policy.  It

I worked for a large company that had big blue managing the network.  We had 
to force to 100FD otherwise the NICs would always negotiate to a lower rate 
(IIRC it was 10HD though it could have been 100HD).  I was quite surprised 
when I encountered this as I'd never dreamed of forcing NIC speed before and 
had never had trouble with auto-auto on any number of non-"Enterprise" 
switches.  I don't know if it was an issue with Cisco or just the way the 
switches had been configured ... either way I wasn't in the position to fight 
the machine.

Where I'm currently working we also use Cisco gear and we use auto-auto 
everywhere without problems (typically the same HP server models that I was 
using at that other place).  One difference is that almost all of the links 
at the new place are gigabit.  I have been told by some that gigabit must use 
autoneg, it cannot be forced ... not certain that is true, I'd think it 
mostly depends on how the network guys configure the switches.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada
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