Switch, Server NIC, Network Help

[Steven Chen_1]

Hello,

We are going to have a HP Procurve 4100 switch with 48 ports and we have one K260 9000 server with one NIC setting as autoneg=on and half duplex mode.

Before implementing the switch connection, I would like to clarify the questions with gurus' help:

1) To use that switch, we should disable autonegociate and get full duplex. What is the best way to do it without reboot? Would sam do the work?

2) I have other HP and Dell NT servers and clients waiting for connections. Before we connect, do we have to make sure their NICs are full duplex and no autonego? And how?

3) We have one Cisco router with the FastEthernet card configured as half duplex. What is the implication of this if change or not change it to full duplex? (considering the switch only have 48 ports but we have hundreds of clients).

All comments are very appreciated.

Steven

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Steven,

You should be able to change the speed setting and make auto neg off by using sam and configuring the network card under networking and communication. This won't need a reboot. Make sure your switch is set to 100 FD, fixed auto neg off before you do the same on the server.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Steven Chen_1]

Thanks for the help.

But my sam nic duplex mode is 'grey' out. Any other command we can get away of?

Thanks,

Steven

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Steven,

Do you have the latest 100 BaseT patches for the network card on your system. Check the hp web site for the patches for your network card. Do a ioscan and check the type of network card you have on the system. If the driver is btlan1 / btlan2 .... Then check the hp site for the latest set of 100 BaseT patches. Think you need some patches.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Steven,

For question 1: Does your NIC on the K260 support 100Mb? The built-in NIC on my K570 is 10HD only. "ioscan -fnC lan" will show your NICs. My built-in shows as:
lan 0 10/12/6 lan2 CLAIMED INTERFACE Built-in LAN
/dev/diag/lan0 /dev/ether0

I believe the NIC will be physically labeled 10baseT or 100baseT. I expect it's 10baseT.

I can't help with question 2.

For question 3, if you force the router into 100FD, you should force the switch port into 100FD also. Full duplex should provide faster throughput however some applications may not take full advantage of full duplex so the increase may not be significant. Given the choice, I use 100FD.

There have been a number of threads in these forums concerning half duplex vs full duplex. Try using several combinations of half, full, duplex, throughput, etc and search the forums.

Darrell

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Darrell,

That was a good point. Steven can you check if your NIC supports 100 MBPS. I have system where we have additional NIC cards at 100 MBPS and so i assumed your case would be same. The NIC on the core IO supports 10MBPS only, so if you are trying to configure the lan port on core io it will not work. Can you post a output of your ioscan command for us to look at and if you have a 100 mbps card on your system, we may be able to suggest some patches too. Also mention the version of operating system you are using.

Thanks
Sanjay

[Steven Chen_1]

Thanks a lot for the helps.

I am using hpux11i 64 bit on K260 box. The ioscan -fnC lan results are:

-------------------------------

#ioscan -fnC lan

lan 0 10/4/8 btlan1
CLAIMED INTERFACE HP HP-PB 100 Base TX card
/dev/diag/lan0 /dev/ether0 /dev/lan0

lan 1 10/12/6 lan2
CLAIMED INTERFACE Built-in LAN
/dev/diag/lan1 /dev/ether1
---------------------------------

I am using lan0 (this first one), which is 100base. It is a seperated NIC. The built-in 10base card is not used.

I feel bad about the need to patch the system again, for I just had hpux11i 64 bit OS newly installed a few months ago. I have limited file system space left. Can you also tell me how many more space needed for this patch?

Thank you very much again.

Steven

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Steven,

Just to give you an idea, if you have not patched the system even once after loading the OS, you may need a lot of disk space. Do you have hp software contract, if so you can do a patch analysis for your server and find out the total number of patches required and the disk space required to load these patches. Here is a link to the custom patch manager and the howto tells you how to do the patch analysis and get the results,

http://us-support.external.hp.com/wps/bin/doc.pl/sid=cffb78250cd8b9e71a/screen=wpsHome

I don't see any patch for btlan1. Check and see if you have the driver and its dependencies correctly installed. If possible can you reload the driver and its dependencies.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Darrell Allen]

Hi again,

Okay, you can use SAM to change to full duplex. First turn off autoneg then the duplex button should no longer be grayed out.

Be sure to also set the switch port to 100FD. If you leave it at autoneg and the server is forced to 100FD, you'll probably have throughput problems.

Also, you can change the setting for lan0 on the fly with:
lanadmin -X 100FD 0

Check the setting before and after with:
lanadmin -x 0

man lanadmin for more info.

Darrell

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Steven,

Also check and make sure your port on the switch is set to 100 Full Duplex. That could be the reason you are unable to change the card to 100 MBPS.

Hope this helps.

Regds