spectrum48k

Is there much to be gained from removing the "auto negotiation" setting and permanently setting to 100Mb/s full duplex ?

Also, flow control is set to disabled - should this always be the case ?

The NIC is attached to a brand new 4 port wireless cable router.

mike1210

If its a new router and new ish network card, it should auto detect a full duplex 100 meg connection. You could check in the network properties to make sure it has done so.

David_Wallis

I would allways set the link speed manually on servers when using cisco switches.. at home auto should be fine.

mike1210

David, can this affect MAC bindings if you tie private IP's to MAC's, having mega problems on mine at the moment, will not bind to IP's

unfeasablylargegonads

iTrader: (3)

I am with David, Auto negotiation on 10/100 is pants, allways hard code it if possible. All the 1000 stuff I seen so far I've had no problems with though.

IP to MAC binding have nothing to do with negotiation settings. Thats ARP. What can happen is that you get a situation where the device will report that the interface is up yet no frames will be transmited/recieved (thus no ARP or anything). Try auto/manual setting the duplex and speed/ reseting the equipment or interface. Also make sure that if you do manualy set one side of the connection that you also set the other side to the same.

spectrum48k

I've set the NIC to 100 full duplex and it seems to have improved performance, or rather eliminated a problem I was having when the computer seemed to lose its connection for a short period of time (10-20secs). Its a wired connection into a 100 switch.

Question - Are NIC's much of a CPU hog ? eg. is it possible to improve performance by buying a NIC with its own processor which doesn't have the same impact on the host CPU or is it negligible ?

unfeasablylargegonads

iTrader: (3)

Indeed NICs/network traffic can effect system performance as it causes CPU interrupts to process the packets. You can get NICs with TCP/IP offload engines but these are realy only used for heavly used servers etc.. and its not so much of an issue with todays high speed CPU's at 100Mbs.

If you have a non manageable switch you should leave the NIC in auto, unless there is some way to set the speed/Duplex settings on the switch.

If you know what you are doing you can mess around with MTU,TCP window and buffer sizes, But in short if you have both the NIC and the Switch running at 100Mbs Full Duplex then leave it alone

If you continue to have problems try another Cable,switch port or NIC.

David_Wallis

As big bollocks said basically!

Only thing I have read is that some standards dictated that you should only be able to achieve gigabit by autonegotiation. (it was a problem I was having on the IBM X335 servers) but I dont believe it really. (Intel Drivers)

Thats exactly the problem you get on the cisco's and HP combo's (All I really worked with, so cant comment on others) If you watch the port it has an orange light, then goes green for a bit then orange.. and so on..

playing with the port options can make it get the link quicker, but thats irrelevant.