Hardwiring a Gigabit Ethernet Card

[Andrew Kaplan]

We have a workstation running Red Hat 8.0 with a copper-based gigabit ethernet card. The card is currently set to auto-negotiate, but we want to hardwire it to a specific speed. Is there a tool that can be used to accomplish this? We know that MII-Tool does not work with gigabit cards.

[Steven E. Protter]

You can't do that with Gigabit cards. Gigabit cards at least every one I saw requires auto negotiate on the switch and the card.

Sorry.

SEP

[Mark Grant]

I'll second SEP here.

You can't do it.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

Just checked with my intel copper-and I must join to the masters-you can't do that...

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

Anyway the tool that's generally used is: mii-tool
run man to see it's options

[Andrew Kaplan]

Guys --
I found the answer on the web. This was quite obscure so I thought it would do us all good if I posted it here. Please let me know what you think.

[Seth Parker]

Andrew,

I believe everyone assumed you were trying to configure the card at GB speed. That's what you're not supposed to be able to do. The settings in the doc you posted are so that you can configure the card to your liking when using non-GB speeds (10/100). If you're using a non-GB switch/hub, then use the parameters in the doc. Otherwise, you should just leave it alone.

Regards,
Seth

[Jerome Henry]

And auto-negociate will downlevel your speed if the other equipment doesn't support GB. So why bother anyway ?

J

[Andrew Kaplan]

Our network, which is currently at 100 MB full duplex, is set up such that auto-negotiate tends to cause problems in speed. We did a test with a ten megabyte file that was to be transferred with FTP. We discovered that pulling the file from a remote server achieved a speed close to 100 MB. However, pushing the same file did not achieve nearly the same amount. There was something with autonegotiate that was interferring with the transfer. By 'hardwiring' the speed in the module.conf file, we were able to achieve near or at 100 MB speed in both directions.