speed and duplex config

[LEJARRE Patrick]

hi,
how to best configure the communication between
an HP9000 workstation and its linked hub/switch port?

Has anyone already experienced severe problems with the autodetection mode activated ( on both cpu and hub/switch ports ) ?

thanks for your help.

[Lance Brown · Accepted solution]

Auto-negotiation has never really performed to well. Speed wise it is fairly reliable, duplex wise, it is often wrong more often then correct. The chipset used in the NIC and the switch used can greatly affect the success rate. For any critical node, I always hardcode the speed and duplex, even if a machine can negotiate properly, it may make a mismatch down the road and cause problems. For end-user machines, I could really careless, as they won???t be able to tell the difference between full and half-duplex anyway.

I would set the workstation and the switch to the desired speed and duplex setting.

Lance

[Heinz Gaertner]

Hi,

i agree to Lance. Got every server in our net with hardcoded speed and duplex-behaviour (machine and switch!). The only problem i discovered until now is when i use a ignite-server for recovery of a system. There we are setting the switch-port to half-duplex, because on firmware level (when system boots via network and gets his archive back) it does use half-duplex. With the wrong settings you can wait hours, while with correct settings it's about half an hour. Since a complete system-recovery is a rare case it's ok for us to manually set the switch back to half-duplex in this case.

Bye
Heinz