I thought the common behavior is that if one side force any particular
parameter, other side should "sense" that and go to that mode too.
Nope. That is a common misconception and perhaps the source of many
duplex mismatch problems today. Here is some boilerplate I bring-out
from time to time that may be of help:
$ cat usenet_replies/duplex
How 100Base-T Autoneg is supposed to work:
When both sides of the link are set to autoneg, they will "negotiate"
the duplex setting and select full-duplex if both sides can do
full-duplex.
If one side is hardcoded and not using autoneg, the autoneg process
will "fail" and the side trying to autoneg is required by spec to use
half-duplex mode.
If one side is using half-duplex, and the other is using full-duplex,
sorrow and woe is the usual result.
So, the following table shows what will happen given various settings
on each side:
Auto Half Full
Auto Happiness Lucky Sorrow
Half Lucky Happiness Sorrow
Full Sorrow Sorrow Happiness
Happiness means that there is a good shot of everything going well.
Lucky means that things will likely go well, but not because you did
anything correctly :) Sorrow means that there _will_ be a duplex
mis-match.
When there is a duplex mismatch, on the side running half-duplex you
will see various errors and probably a number of _LATE_ collisions
("normal" collisions don't count here). On the side running
full-duplex you will see things like FCS errors. Note that those
errors are not necessarily conclusive, they are simply indicators.
Further, it is important to keep in mind that a "clean" ping (or the
like - eg "linkloop" or default netperf TCP_RR) test result is
inconclusive here - a duplex mismatch causes lost traffic _only_ when
both sides of the link try to speak at the same time. A typical ping
test, being synchronous, one at a time request/response, never tries
to have both sides talking at the same time.
Finally, when/if you migrate to 1000Base-T, everything has to be set
to auto-neg anyway.
rick jones
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