Re: BETA3 showstoppers (read: critical bugs)

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 12:18, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> I can confirm Brandon's comments (re: 802.3 speed/duplex negotiation not
> working properly with Cisco equipment).  At Best, we had to force duplex
> and speed on both our Catalysts and our BSD boxes, otherwise, mysterious
> problems would occur (slow transfer rates in one direction, input or
> output errors, etc.).  I'm sure Matt Dillon can attest to this as well.
> 
> I highly doubt it's specific to the xl driver, or even 3Com cards, since
> 4-5 months ago I had such issues connecting a Catalyst to an HP ProCurve
> switch -- again, had to force the speed and duplex on both ends.  I think
> this is a pretty "historic" problem with Cisco equipment.  Look around
> the Web and you'll see what I mean.
> 
> The procedure, if I remember right:
> 
> Cat> set port x/y speed 100
> Cat> set port x/y duplex full
> Cat> set port disable x/y
> 
> BSD> ifconfig xl0 ... media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
> BSD> [see note]
> 
> Cat> set port enable x/y
> 
> NOTE: Occasionally I'd also see this procedure fail until the BSD box was
> actually *rebooted*.  This problem always eluded me, but may have
> changed severely since the days of 2.2.8 ( :) ).

FWIW: I have autonegotiation problems between Cisco switches and way too
many pieces of equipment to list here (including, but not limited to:
several models of IBM RS/6000, couple of Sun boxes, fxp & bge under
Windows/Linux/FreeBSD, etc.). Forcing speed to 100-FDX solves the
problem for good. Usual symptoms -- under heavy load transfer speeds
slows to crawl and connection is being dropped eventually. Only common
denominator is Cisco switch. 

HTH.
---
Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko.