Does HP still recommend hard-coding NICs to speed?

[Louis Henninger_1]

All:

At one time HP/Compaq recommended hard coding the NIC speed rather than leaving it at AUTO.

Is that still the posture and concensus?

Thanks,

Louis

[TTr]

I have not seen a recent stand on this.

I had problems very recently with having the speed set to AUTO on both the server and the LAN switch.

So it depends on your environment and what kind of LAN switches you use. If you have issues, make it a standard to hard set either the server or the LAN switches only. Then leave the other side to auto.

I also found out that it does not depend on the LAN switch make, sometimes it has to do with the model and firmware level.

[Louis Henninger_1]

Thank you for replying.

I'm going to leave this thread open, maybe HP can shed some light on their recommendations.

When I worked for DEC/Compaq/HP the recommendations to the field were hard-code the speed on both ends, as not all network switches auto'ed as well as Cisco.

I'm trying to set a standard for implementation of new servers in our datacenter.

[marcus1234 · Accepted solution]

auto neg is the preferred standard option ,

unless switch (ios ) dictates otherwise..

[rick jones]

Well there were/are two autos - autosense for speed and autonegotiation for duplex. In the past, when there was a lot of (IMO) broken kit out there that could not autonegotiate correctly, many suggested hardcoding duplex settings.

In *my* corner of HP (HP 9000's and HP Integrity systems) the NICs in use did (and do) autoneg correctly, and my suggestion has "always" been to use autoneg. Some of the reasoning behind that is in the attached, which goes back a long time...