What's wrong with autonegotiate

From: cbaker@GOODYEAR.COM
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 15:17:57 EST


I have noticed lately that some still say in this site "DO NOT
AUTONEGOTIATE your speed/duplex on IBM AIX boxes.

We had major problems with that back in the early AIX 433 (or earlier) days
and back with the 43P-140 [7043-140] (and first cut of the 150's and 260's)
and the first auto-negotiating ethernet cards.

BUT, we were told that with the newer boxes (about the time when they went
from beige to black cases) that the problem was fixed. It was NOT an OS
issue but rather a NIC issue.

In our case, we had (and still have) a lot of EnteraSys (Cabletron)
switches. We were told that the "world" used one negotiation schema (i.e.
Cabletron, HP, SUN, SGI), but IBM was using a different method in those
ethernet cards. So, we saw that the NIC and the network hub/port were
never coming to an agreement at what speed and duplex to use. So, we
ticked off our Network group and made them lock down the ports to 100/Full.

But, since then, (a couple years now at least) we have been setting both
the NIC and the network port to autonegotiate and have had no problems.

Is there a new problem?

Christopher M. Baker
Senior Technical Support Analyst
DSE/TCO
Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company

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