HPUX 11.0: Autonegotation Gig Ethernet NIC Setting

[LG Porter]

I have recently installed a Gigbit Ethernet 1000Base-SX and have it attached to Cisco 6509 switch which has a gigbit module installed. The perform is very poor. I have adjusted the MTU size. How do I set the autonegotation off? WHat is the preferred setting for this card? What should be the MTU set at?

[Ravi_8 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

MTU should be either at 1500 or 9000.

you can set autonegotiation to OFF using SAM-->network and coomunications-->network interface card--> choose the NIC --> actions-->modify , you can see the Autoneg: field which can be made OFF/ON

[Pete Randall]

There's a patch mentioned in this thread that may be applicable:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xa0cb50dde50cd71190050090279cd0f9,00.html


Pete

[Pete Randall]

You also might want to check this one out:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x848393e260b0d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Sorry that dog won't hunt. Gigabit absolutely requires auto-negotiation on or it will never go into 1000Base mode.

[Michael Steele_2]

WOOF!

(* Just a rat... *)

[Ajit Natarajan]

Which Gigabit card are you using (A4926A or A6847-60101)? It would be great if you could post the ioscan(1M) output for the card instance.

Note that 1000Base-SX will only operate in 1000 Mb/s mode. Turning autonegotiation off is not going to change that. Disabling autoneg. will disable certain other negotiations (e.g., flow control). You will need to disable autoneg. at both ends (switch and server).

I would greatly appreciate it if you post the lanadmin(1M) stats drv output. The syntax is:

lanadmin -x stats drv

where is the PPA of the instance.

In particular, I'm interested in the NIC Events Statistics section of the output.

This will help me dig deeper into your problem.

Also, how did you measure the performance to determine that it is poor?

Thanks.

Ajit
HP Gigabit Ethernet

[Stefan Pendl]

Hi,
We have a "HP A4926A PCI 1000Base-SX Adapter" installed on an L1000 running HP-UX 11i connected to a "Alcatel Omni Switch/Router! Version 4.1.4 GA".
The switch does not support autoneg and is cofigured to 1000 Full Duplex auto=off, the card is not manualy configured.
It uses the default values of 1000 Full Duplex auto=off MTU=1500.

BTW I encountered problems with the buildin 100BT cards of our C3600, that I had to disable autoneg on the switch.
The cards always turned to 100 Half Duplex with auto=on.
I disabled the rc-scripts to configure the lan cards and was able to use autoneg on both sides.

---
Stefan

[rick jones]

Unless you _KNOW_ that the 6509 supports a 9000 byte jumboframe option, keep the MTU on the GbE interface at 1500 bytes. Some Cisco kit talks about support for "jumboframes" but only out to a couple KB of frame size. The HP GbE NICs only support 1500 or 9000.

Drifting...

As for autoneg and 100BT (for one of the followup posters), if one side is hardcoded, autoneg on the other side will _fail_ - you must not hardcode one side and expect the otherside in autoneg to detect what the hardcoded setting is. Autoneg just isn't speced that way.

When autoneg fails, the NIC doing autoneg is required by spec to go into half-duplex mode - the assumption being that the other end of the wire is not full-duplex capable.

So, if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that autoneg will not work between an HP 9000 NIC and a switch port, and it is impossible to get the switch fixed/replaced to properly support autoneg (presuming that the NIC is doing it right :) then you should hardcode - but when you hardcode, you should/must hardcode everything every where on the switch and NICs to the same value - otherwise, someone neatening-up the cables will put your network into chaos.

It is best to get the root cause fixed - autoneg not working - rather than simply kludging around it with the hardcodes. Otherwise, you have to remember each time you do a new installation to configure the NIC for the hardcode settings.

[Steven E. Protter]

Especialy if the back end switch is Cisco, you are better off manually setting network speeds not using automegotiate.

Have the port on the switch set to the maximum speed and duplex setting for the NIC card.

Then hard code your speed and network settings in the following file:

/etc/rc.config.d/hpbtlanconf

example

HP_BTLAN_INTERFACE_NAME[0]=lan0
HP_BTLAN_STATION_ADDRESS[0]=
HP_BTLAN_SPEED[0]=10HD
HP_BTLAN_INTERFACE_NAME[1]=lan1
HP_BTLAN_STATION_ADDRESS[1]=
HP_BTLAN_SPEED[1]=100FD


lan0 is 10BaseT half fuplex in this case, lan1 is 100 BaseT full duplex. That second setting is hardcoded into the switch port.

SEP

[Ajit Natarajan]

Please do not confuse BT settings with SX settings. They are completely different. BT refers to copper, SX refers to fiber.

With copper, autonegotiation determines speed, duplex, and other parameters. For this to work correctly, both sides (switch and server) should have autonegotiation enabled or both sides should have speed/duplex fixed with autonegotiation disabled. Otherwise, the side that autonegotiates will default to half duplex. If the other side is full duplex, performance will significantly degrade.

In the case of fiber, speed and duplex are not negotiated even if autonegotiation is enabled. The speed is always 1000 Mb/s and 1000Base-SX only supports full duplex. Autonegotiation is used to negotiate other parameters such as flow control. Again, it is best to either enable autonegotiation on both sides or disable it on both sides.

I would still request the original poster to give me the following details:
1. OS version.
2. Card version (A4926A or A6847-60101). ioscan output for the instance would give this.
3. lanadmin -x stats drv output.
4. lanadmin -x card_info output.
5. How you determined that the performance is poor.

Thanks.

Ajit
HP Gigabit Ethernet