On Tue, 8 Dec 2009, Joe Abley wrote:
I find there is a lot of hard-coded wisdom that hard-coded speed duplex are the way to avoid pain.
That was definitely true in the mid-to-late 1990s.
The last time I saw anybody do a modern survey of switches, routers and hosts, however, it seemed like the early interop problems with autoneg on FE really don't exist today, and on balance there are probably more duplex problems caused by hard-configured ports that are poorly maintained in the heat of battle than there are because autoneg is flaky.
Yes. The autoneg specification was fixed in 1998 so modern kit should interoperate properly.
I've also heard people say that whatever you think about autoneg in Fast Ethernet, on Gigabit and 10GE interfaces it's pretty much never the right idea to turn autoneg off.
Autoneg is a required part of the gig E specification so you'd only be causing yourself trouble by turning it off. (I don't know if it'll also break automatic MDI/MDI-X (crossover) configuration, for an example of something that's nice to have.) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ GERMAN BIGHT HUMBER: SOUTHWEST 5 TO 7. MODERATE OR ROUGH. SQUALLY SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD.