Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 13:42:40 -0400 From: Mitch Collinsworth <mkc@Graphics.Cornell.EDU> To: Christopher Michaels <ChrisMic@clientlogic.com> Cc: "'Mike Squires'" <mikes@sir-alan.chem.indiana.edu>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Setting Intel Pro100B to half duplex Message-ID: <199910121742.AA193980161@broccoli.graphics.cornell.edu> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:52:15 EDT." <6C37EE640B78D2118D2F00A0C90FCB4401105CE0@site2s1>
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>Specify the 100BaseTX media w/o the "full-duplex" media option and it will >use half-duplex. Auto is notorious for not properly detecting things. >-Chris umm, the last time this question came up (i.e. when I asked it), the answer was that not specifying full-duplex puts you in autonegotiate mode. Ok, after double-checking myself on this, the answer you (Christopher Michaels gave) was that you would get half-duplex. But the answer David Greenman <dg@root.com> gave was: > The fxp device does default to auto-sense, but if you hard configure the >other end then [NWAY] autonegotiation is disabled, and thus whenever you do >that you have to set both ends if you want to be sure it is correct. The >default without autonegotiation is half-duplex. meanwhile fxp(4) says: > The fxp device driver was written by David Greenman. Guess who I believe. Also I'm curious about your statement about autonegotiate being notorious. I've heard this stated frequently but never with any data to back it up. After the above reply from Mr. Greenman I read up on autonegotiation in 3 different books on high-speed networking and have come to the _tentative_ conclusion that this rumor is based on old hardware. It seems that the 100 Mbps ethernet spec pre-dates the NWAY autonegotation spec and in fact there was a different method used for autonegotiation in the earliest days of 100 Mbps ethernet. My guess is that this rumor was started during those early days and is still being dutifully passed on by those who experienced problems with the early non-NWAY equipment (and those who've heard the war stories from them). Can you (or anyone) state with any degree of certainty that any modern equipment built with NWAY autonegotiation exhibits any problems with autonegotiation? -Mitch To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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