Fast Ethernet & Full Duplex (was Re: [rescue] 501-2646?)

[Björn Ramqvist]

Bill Bradford wrote:
> 
> Same here; company policy is to hard-lock all ports full duplex.
> 
> Autonegotiation NEVER works right.

It's the other way around here.

Among all the SGI's, PeeCee's and Alphas, our networking manager had
this wonderful idea; force _ALL_ Cisco equipment to do 100Mbit/Full
Duplex when we step away from FDDI<->10Mbit hubs and go for
1Gbit<->100Mbit switches.
Autonegotiate DO fail when you hardlock the switch and leave the host in
auto, that's a fact, but he didn't care.
- "We want to be absolutely sure.", he said.

The PeeCee-guys worked this out by setting 100Mbit/Full Duplex in the
Intel Ethernet EPROM, the Alphas can be set at the console-level to do
that, but my SGI gear is by default (in kernel) to do NWay
Autonegotiaton. I didn't want to kernelhack just to get this thing
going, so I just put the ports on "AUTO" on the Cisco for all the
SGI-gear. Did it work? Like a charm ever since.
I showed him the results after that and we kind of worked out a deal
that "all SGI-gear is special stuff".
(Well, it IS special stuff, right?) :-)

/Bjorn