ethtool does not work on DL380 / RHEL AS3?

[W Sanders_1]

I am trying to force speed/duplex/authneg, nothing happens:

# /sbin/ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Auto-negotiation: on
[etc]
# /sbin/ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off
# /sbin/ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Auto-negotiation: on
[etc]

Any ideas?

[W Sanders_1]

It looks like ethtool is returning the wrong information:
# /sbin/mii-tool
eth0: no autonegotiation, 100baseTx-HD, link ok
# /sbin/ethtool eth0
Auto-negotiation: on
And when I /sbin/ethtool -s eth0 autoneg on the interface hangs.

/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 duplex full has no effect:
# /sbin/ethtool -s eth0 duplex full
# /sbin/mii-tool
eth0: no autonegotiation, 100baseTx-HD, link ok

So it looks like mii-tool is the way to go, except that gigabit would not be supported unless we just let the port autonegotiate.

BTW we are using the RHEL3 tg3 driver. Maybe the Broadcom driver would work better.

[David Claypool]

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=PSD_CN0262W

[Steven E. Protter]

You should never have to force autonegotiate off or any settings on Linux.

Every distribution I've ever worked with correctly detects speed and can live in a networking environment.

I'd look at the network hardware and switch port settings before trying anything else on the OS.

SEP

[Ryan Frank]

While I agree you should never have to modify speed and duplex... I have also found it necessary to force a setting... I did it through the modules.conf to force the setting on the internal network interfaces.

I have ETH0 connected to 1G/FD and ETH1 connected to 10M/FD. Here is my entry...

options e1000 Speed=1000,10 Duplex=2,2

I looked in the file:

/usr/src/linux-2.4.21-27.EL/Documentation/networking/e1000.txt for the options to use.

-Ryan

[W Sanders_1]

Thanks for that support document. It doesn't really explain why ethtool doesn't work at all for just speed/duplex settings, according to the doc "-s" is supposed to work for the listed interfaces in RHEL3. The "Hardware Support Table" doesn't seem to include the builtin BCM5700 in the DL380 G3, unless HP calls it something other than what lspci calls it:

02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5703 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 02)

Well I know that tg3 is supposed to work with generic BMC5700 interfaces - I had a lot of experience with Dells and this issue - the RH9 2.4.21- kernels fixed this. Don't know if the RHEL3 tg3.o is more or less recent.

I agree that autonegotiation nearly always works these days. But perpetuating the myth that it doesn't keeps the a lot of Cisco techs employed and responding to service requests to tweak port settings, right?