[c-nsp] 3508 / GBIC ZX / Minimum IOS

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Gert Doering wrote:

> Good thing ("isn't that what UDLD is for?").  Why not call it "reliable 
> link-state detection", then?

UDLD is a fairly new software based mechanism. Autoneg i hardware. Much 
faster.

> Well.  There might be good reasons - I'm just annoyed on all this,
> because I've spent too much time hunting "bad cables" that have been
> negotiation issues in the end...

Well, you do have to learn how it works. It's the same way with autoneg 
for 100TX. If you don't know how it works (for instance auto at one end 
and 100/full at the other end) you end up with it not working correctly.

> That's one of my major gripes: if it's useful, it shouldn't ever have 
> been *optional*...

Well, the GSR does autoneg, it just doesn't do it reliably. Same thing on 
several cisco platforms on 100TX. You can count on any crappy dlink, 
netgear or alike both NIC and switch to do autoneg reliably, but the 
highend stuff doesn't for some reason.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se