100Base-TX NIC vs. Cisco 4006 Switch

[Mike Hassell]

Well it seems our switch upgrade didn't go as well as planned and I have a few questions for those out there who have HP HSC 100Base-TX NICs installed.

Unfortunately I was not here to troubleshoot the problem when it came up, so there are many inconsistencies in my current configuration. To get to the point, I had only one of the HSC 100Base-TX nics active, set at 100/Half. When the switch was upgraded, they left the port to auto sense the speed, which doesn't seem to play pretty with the HP NIC.

At the current time the switch is hard coded at 100/Half and lanadmin is telling me the card is set at 100/Full. My question is, what are my options to fix this problem without a full reboot. I don't mind dropping the NIC after hours for a min or two, but I can't afford a full reboot of the machine.

lanadmin is reporting the following:

Alignment Errors = 20536
FCS Errors = 41233

This is after the counters were reset less than 48 hours ago. The box is currently up and traffic is transpiring to and from the clients, however it is far from optimal. I have properly edited hpgsc100conf to reflect the proper settings and would like to bring the NIC down and have it reinit and agree with the switch settings. I would just like to know the ramifications of restarting the hpgsc100 init script. Do I need to bring net down as well and in what order does this need to be done?

Also I would like to know if anyone out there fully understands how the network interfaces are initialized during the boot process. It seems that once the hardware inits and a link light appears, the Cisco switch tries it's auto negotiation, while it will be over 10 mins before the actual init script talks to the card. Can anyone inform me of how exactly this process occurs? and what my current options may be? Thanks.

- Mike

[Patrick Wallek]

If lanadmin is showing your card set to 100Full, then chances are it is 100Full. Another place to check the /etc/rc.config.d/hp?conf file that is appropriate for that card. There should be a line similar to:

HP_BASET_DUPLEX[0]=FULL

I would make sure that the appropriate values are set on both the switch and the HP-UX box. Autonegotiation is imperfect, as you have seen.

The actions I would take next: Verify speed / duplex of card on HP-UX box. Set the switch to that speed / duplex and make sure AutoNegotiation is turned OFF. You should be able to change the settings on the switch without too much impact on the HP-UX box.