Weird networking issue.

Tue Jan 7 22:36:00 UTC 2003

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Braun, Mike wrote:

> I think we all agree that autonegotiation is evil, and should be avoided
> whenever possible.  When you are looking for the root cause of the errors on

I don't agree. I have seen more problems generated by incompetence in 
trying to fix duplex/speed, than I have seen problems generated by autoneg 
not working properly.

I am always amazed by the fact that very few people out there know that 
you have to lock duplex at BOTH ENDS of any given link for it to work 
properly.

Generally, in a LAN environment with good quality switches and good
network cards, autoneg works just fine. Yes, with 10/100 meg
fiber/converters converters you should definately lock duplex, but in most
other cases I recommend to leave the duplex setting to auto.

Yes, cisco routers are notoriously bad at doing autoneg, but I blame that
on cisco and not on autoneg. The el cheapo $50 desktop switches seem to
hack autoneg just fine.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se