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

[Jay Hennigan]

John Neiberger wrote:

>We have the opposite philosophy. We set everything to auto. We have
>*far* more problems with hard-set switch settings. It's been my
>experience--and I have documentation at work to back this up--that
>hard setting your devices to 100/Full is the worst possible choice.
>
>The short story is that there is no standard method of behavior when a
>NIC or switch port is hard set. Some devices still participate in Nway
>autonegotiation even when hard set, while others completely disable
>Nway. You run into problem when you connect devices that behave
>differently. Some NICs that still participate in Nway will see that
>there is no autonegiating link partner, so they'll try to be "helpful"
>and fall back to half duplex under the assumption that they are not
>connected to a device capable of full duplex.
>  
>
I have never seen problems with Cisco gear setting BOTH sides hard-coded.
We always hard-code interfaces between network gear.  The switch ports
going through the patch panel to workstation jacks we leave autonegotating.