On Fri 17 Dec, 1999, "Walsh, Warren (MN65)" Walsh_Warren@htc.honeywell.com wrote:
We recently converted our 330 and 540 from FDDI to 100BaseT. We found that we had to manually force both the 100BaseT card in the toaster and the specific port on our Cabletron Smart Switch 9000 to 100BaseT-FD. For the 100BaseT card, it was simply changing the auto to 100tx-fd:
ifconfig e5 `hostname`-e5 mediatype 100tx-fd netmask 255.255.248.0
Funny how that auto-negotiation thing never really works, and how much it really affects performance.
Funny, I was only talking with a friend today about how autonegotiation between Sun's and Ciscos works fine, and how Cabletron kit has such irritatingly non-functional autonegotiation in contrast.
In my last job, running any number of Su's, SGI's and NetApp's using Cabletron switches the network guys and I always went hunting for the ports where the collisions were high and the autonegotiation had been left on, or turned back on.. As policy we decided to pin both ends to 100BaseTX-fd no-autonegotiation, because anything else was markedly less effective.
This wasn't the only problem we had with Cabletron kit though - there were some horrors with the spanning tree reconfigurations, and pakcet fragmentation, and adjacent switches somehow bollixing sets of ports on other switches.
Put me right off Cabletron as a networking equipment vendor I have to say. YMMV.
I always quite liked FDDI: most of our filers were on FDDI and, perhaps because of the extra smarts in the cards, the performance was always pretty darned good.
We even got our biggest machines their own Gigaswitch ports - though I never figured out if the cards (DEC cards in NetApp, DEC gigaswitch) went into the full-duplex mode that the DEC network engineers though they might be able to do when plugged straight into the Gigaswitch.
Sure made cabling in the machine room easier using FDDI too. Until they put decent amounts of structured wiring in.
-warren
Warren Walsh Honeywell Technology Center -- End of excerpt from "Walsh, Warren (MN65)"