Forcing Gigabit Speed

[Mike Leighton_1]

On a NC7770 there is no option to force speed to 1000Mb, is this not possible with gigabit? We're using Dell gigabit switches and they also will only set to 10/100 or auto.

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

It's my understanding that gigabit NICs should be set to auto-negotiate.


Pete

[Mike Leighton_1]

OK, Thanks Pete, do you know why this is the case? We've always been used to forcing network speed in the past.

[Patrick Wallek]

If I remember correctly, with Gigabit speed, auto negotiate is your only choice. There is no option to for 1Gb.

[Pete Randall]

Mike,

True! With 100 Base/T, you had to force both ends of the connection, but apparently the 1000 Base/T standard has cleaned up the problems with auto-negotiate and doesn't even allow you to choose something else!


Pete

P.S. Give Patrick some points, would you please?

[Mike Leighton_1]

Great, thanks to both of you.

Pete, are you on commission!

[Pete Randall]

Mike,

No, not on commission, I'm just trying to help push Patrick to the next level: 29 points to go now, thanks to you!


Pete

[rick jones]

When 100BT first came-out, it was possible to have NICs/drivers/whatever that would not support auto-neg. There was also the question of legacy 10 Mbit/s equipment.

IIRC Gigabit makes support of auto-neg mandatory and presumeably much less buggy - and as pointed-out, able to build on the experience with 100BT.

Oh, and btw, why are you asking about an NC7770 in an HP-UX forum?-)

[Mike Leighton_1]

Ah yes, good spot Nick.

In my defence I searched for an answer first and found a similar post but it didn't answer my question so I just hit new post, didn't notice it was a ux forum!

Still got the answers from some nice people though :)