[c-nsp] Negotiation problem with Catalyst 2950 and Cisco 2821

[C. Jon Larsen]

> On 12/3/05, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
> Thanks Reuben, finally someone who isn't a Cisco apologist!  I
> figured it would be OBVIOUS to anyone with HALF A BRAIN that
> setting autonegotiation on both sides should make it "just work"
> out of the box.  This IS cisco-to-cisco gear we are talking about
> here.

I find it quite odd that as a service provider you would ever trust your 
network to autonegotiation.

Hard code the port - leave nothing to chance. Is just one 
extra command, and you should be doing that after you label the port, 
with a description and putting it in a vlan, correct ?


With the exception of some cheap nics (and older drivers on windows 
servers) I have never seen hardcoding **both** sides to full duplex 10 or 
100 fail to produce good results. Failing to set speed and duplex will 
(even if it works at first) usually bite you down the road i.e. typically 
in a late nite reboot situation when it fails and one side is full and 
the other side is in half (the default).


That being said autonegotiate **should** work in most cases, but why leave 
it to chance for anything important like a switch to switch or a switch 
to router or switch to customer handoff ? Ciscos have always had 
autonegotiate problems, dating back to the 5000 and 5500 switches, its 
nothing new.

Even with Bay and 3com switches (which do seem to work better with 
autonegotiate) I always hardcoded (to full duplex) the server side with 
mii-tool and the switch side with whatever tool the switch OS provides. 
Guess I am old fashioned.

-jon