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Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 12:15:20 -0600 (MDT)
From: Gary Aitken <garya@nightmare.dreamchaser.org>
Message-Id: <200408071815.i77IFKZq000559@nightmare.dreamchaser.org>
To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Subject: crossover cables, dec 21041 nic, fbsd vs nt
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I'm tearing what little hair I have left out...
Lightning took out my hub, arced to ground in the wall plug
then from the metal UPS case to the metal case of the hub,
a very effective end run...  Sort of amusing to watch in
hindsight.  I think the short was due to dust in the plug
box, as the switchplate has been off quite a while and 
blowing in there created a miniature desert movie set.

While waiting for a new hub to arrive, I decided to jury-rig
a workstation to the firewall freebsd box. (4.10)
Using a cat5 crossover cable, I connected the nic on an NT
box to the NIC on the freebsd box; each of these normally
goes to the hub for the internal network.

ping... nada

So I swapped the network cards individually with the card
serving the dsl modem; they all work.

So I used the crossover cable to connect the NT box to 
another NT box on the internal network.  ping...reply

The nic in question is an old smc 3c509b-combo card
supporting 10baseT UTP, AUI, and BNC.

ifconfig de0 shows:
	media: Ethernet autoselect (10base2/BNC)
	status: active

The green light (indicating a live connection?) is on on both nics.

Manually configuring the nic media type to 10BaseT/UTP made it work.

What's different about a hub environment that allows the system
to automagically determine the media type?

NT seems to have no problem, although it may be the driver is
just defaulting to the right choice in one case and the wrong
one, or none, in another.

Thanks for any insights,

Gary