I agree with Lachlan. Auto neg is the best bet in larger networks I find from personal experience. I cant count the number of times ive seen Foundry and cisco miss-match when attempting to auto neg. Working from past exp when a customer plugs into your network with a "no brand" switch / device (Think colo datacentre's) the first thing I always looked for was stupid MTU settings and duplex miss-match.
Altho in a nice all cisco or all foundry or all whateverotherbrandyoulike enviroment im sure auto neg would work much better. Ive just never had the pleasure of working in a centre like that ;) hahaha Cheers, Jack. -----Original Message----- From: Joel M Snyder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 15 September 2005 4:36 PM To: Lachlan Bowes Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Auto-sensing for IPS devices I disagree that it is *always* a good idea. I think that it's *occasionally* a good idea. Either the standard for auto-sensing works or it doesn't. If you have defective hardware that doesn't work right, then it's better to know about it than to patch around the problem---are you going to set every single port on a flakey switch? Or should you get rid of the switch? However, if you decide that it *is* a good idea, just a reminder that you MUST set BOTH speed and duplex settings and you MUST set BOTH settings on BOTH sides. There is no concept in 802.3 of having only one side autonegotiate and 'learn' what the other side wants. If you take one side out of auto-negotiate mode and hard code a speed/duplex setting, the other side has no way of figuring out what you did. I have seen people who think that they're making things more reliable actually break their networks by only setting one side of the connection and assuming that the other will follow along magically. jms -- Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719 Phone: +1 520 324 0494 (voice) +1 520 324 0495 (FAX) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opus1.com/jms Opus One ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_040708 to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
