Garrett D'Amore wrote: > On 5/26/2010 1:14 PM, James Carlson wrote: >> The standards require that when one side negotiates, and the other does >> not, then the one that tries to negotiate and fails has to fall back to >> a minimum value -- like 10Mbps half-duplex. The error you're seeing is >> most likely caused by having erroneously set the other side to "forced" >> duplex or speed. That other end should be fixed, rather than disabling >> autonegotiation locally. >> > > Actually, I believe the standards *require* autonegotiation for > 1000BaseTX. If you you're using gigabit networking, you need autoneg to > stay standards conformant.
They do require autonegotiation for that, but it's not the case that standards can actually boss your peer around or force anyone to do things they don't want to do. ;-} > What you *can* do is remove certain modes from what is negotiated, but > even that is a bad idea. Yeah; that just reduces the chance that the peers will find a usable set of options. > The days of needing to disable autoneg are long past us. The only sites > that still do this are those that were burned by crummy implementations > of 100BaseT way way back when and have not updated (perhaps they're > running 15 year old Cisco gear?), or those that simply do not know any > better. I think it's mostly the latter. There are admins out there that believe that any sort of negotiation means that you might get an undesired operating mode "sometimes," and thus forcing things is the preferred way to go. I think it's the same sort of mindset that hand-crafts configuration files with every single option set to a specific value, even if the implementor went out of his way to specify good defaults -- on the theory that maybe something might one day change in a patch or an upgrade, and we can't have that happening. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carls...@workingcode.com> _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list networking-discuss@opensolaris.org
