On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 6:21 AM, DLStrout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > After all this is pretty industry standard/best > practice (hard coding speed/duplex on edge > devices/routers/firewalls). >
No, no, no it's *not*. That's the common misperception. Autonegotiation is the single most misunderstood and abused thing in networking in my experience. What ends up happening is it's done inconsistently and creates duplex mismatches all over the place. Virtually all network equipment made in this decade will autonegotiate without any trouble. Every networking vendor recommends using autonegotiate and has for years. The only scenario where you should force is when autonegotiate fails when both ends are set to auto. This will happen occasionally, but is the exception to the rule, not the rule. Autonegotiation got a bad name because it didn't work well in the early days (mid 90s), with the "standard" being implemented in different incompatible ways by different vendors. Some of that sentiment has carried over, which is why you find some networks where everything is forced. It's hidden because it was that way in m0n0wall, and we keep it that way because otherwise people will see it there and think it should be set, which in reality will just cause serious problems 99.999% of the time because people don't understand it and rarely deploy it properly. In the rare scenarios where it's needed, the config can be manually edited. </rant induced by fixing way too many networks where people screw this up> Recommended reading: http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0704/817-7526.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonegotiation --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
