Re: load balanced nic
Shane Chrisp wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 12:25 +0100, ml10154@adreyer.com wrote:
>> Shane Chrisp wrote:
>>> It is quite common practise to set the ports to what you need so that
>>> the auto-negotiation does not get it wrong, in particular setting half
>>> duplex instead of full duplex. This is not so common when its
>>> "cisco connected to cisco", but very common when its "cisco connected to
>>> some other brand".
>> Well it is common practise, but it is also one of the major problems.
>> People tend to forget these settings when they plug in other devices and
>> complain that they have "bad connectivity" or low throughput...
>>
>> Please make sure that you do not disable the auto-negotiation on
>> Gigabit-Ports (at least when running at 1Gbit/s) - it is marked as
>> mandatory in the standard and you should rather fix the broken part that
>> doesn't understand the auto-negotiation than fiddling around with these
>> settings.
> Firstly please don't send directly to me, i am subscribed to the list.
Sorry about that.
> Second, its a bit hard to fix auto-negotiation in a vendors product such
> as a switch, firewall or router. The sad fact is that not all hardware
> plays nice with one another and you sometimes need to set the interfaces
> to prevent problems. Yes that even means Gigabit interfaces. If the
> interfaces negotiated correctly you would not configure the interface to
> a set speed, only when they do not detect each other correctly. Maybe
> that clears things up.
If a device is sold as Gigabit-Switch/-Router/-Firewall and does not
understand Gigabit auto-negotiation I would return it to the seller.
During the specification of Gigabit Ethernet they tried to avoid the
mistakes they made while defining 100Mbit/s and the auto-negotiation
process in Gb/s is pretty clear - if any "Gigabit" device can not work
with it I would expect other problems as well..
Achim
--
Achim Dreyer || http://www.adreyer.com/
Internet Security Consultant || Phone: +44 7756948229
Senior Unix & Network Admin || RHCE, RHCA, CCNA, CCSA, CCSE, CSCE
CAcert Assurer || JNCIS-FW
Reply to: