change NIC speed Post: 302475059

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Operating Systems Solaris change NIC speed Post 302475059 by rbatte1 on Friday 26th of November 2010 09:56:13 AM

11-26-2010

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Well, it's a big question. First you need to know what the NIC will support and what the network switch will support. From them, you can decide what is the best settings. It is best to get the switch port forced to match the speed of your NIC as auto-negotiate may not always work or may cause overheads if it ferequently tries again looking for a faster card.

The process of setting it will depend on your operating system, e.g. for AIX you can:

Code:

chdev -a speed=1000_Full_Duplex ent0

but that is AIX only. Solaris, HP-UX and other flavours all have their own commands.

To perform the action, you will also need to stop the network card, so plan your downtime, work out how to do it from the console only and note all the current configuration before starting. On AIX you sometimes have to delete the interface and boot so that it not in use. This means you will have to input the IP address again, netmask and default gateway again.

Full Duplex vs Half Duplex
Simplex is the sending or receiving of data on a NIC. Duplex is the ability to send and receive data. Dimplex is a radiator manufacturer, which probably isn't any use in this forum.

Full duplex (often lazily called duplex) means the ability to send and receive data at the same time, where half duplex is the ability to only do one at a time.

Basically, when deciding what to set the NIC and the switch port to be, use the highest common speed and the best ???plex that they both work at. I'm guessing that simplex is likely to be out, but if either the NIC or the switch only supports half duplex, then that is what you are stuck with. We have hit very serious problems where when the settings didn't match, to a half duplex NIC and a full duplex switch port. It worked okay until someone did an FTP. The normal telnet/screen traffic was handled okay, but when the FTP kicked in, the dropped packets went through the roof and uses were getting horrible response and partial screen displays. The FTP was also horribly slow.

We had to force the switch port to only be 10M Half Duplex and then performance was wonderful for the FTP and the telnet users were unaffected.

I am, of course, assuming that the NIC and the switch are reasonably close to each other. You may have to lower the speed if the cable it particularly long, but I can't tell you what the limits are. It is just for the connection of the NIC to the switch, not all the way to the user terminal/remote server/whatever.

I hope that this is useful, but if not, do ask more questions.

Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Last edited by rbatte1; 11-26-2010 at 10:56 AM.. Reason: Splling mistoks

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

txp

TXP(4)							   BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual 						    TXP(4)

NAME

     txp -- 3Com 3XP Typhoon/Sidewinder (3CR990) Ethernet interface

SYNOPSIS

     To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file:

	   device txp

     Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):

	   if_txp_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

     The txp interface provides access to the 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s Ethernet networks via the 3Com Typhoon/Sidewinder chipset.

     Basic Ethernet functions are provided as well as support for vlan(4) tag removal and insertion assistance, receive ip(4), tcp(4), and udp(4)
     checksum offloading, and transmit ip(4) checksum offloading.  There is currently no support for transmit tcp(4) or udp(4) checksum offload-
     ing, tcp(4) segmentation, nor ipsec(4) acceleration.

     Each of the host's network addresses is specified at boot time with an SIOCSIFADDR ioctl(2).  The txp interface employs the address resolu-
     tion protocol described in arp(4) to dynamically map between Internet and Ethernet addresses on the local network.

     When a txp interface is brought up, by default, it will attempt to auto-negotiate the link speed and duplex mode.	The speeds, in order of
     attempt, are: 100Mb/s Full Duplex, 100Mb/s Half Duplex, 10 Mb/s Full Duplex, and 10 Mb/s Half Duplex.

     The txp supports several media types, which are selected via the ifconfig(8) command.  The supported media types are:

     media autoselect
	     Attempt to autoselect the media type (default)

     media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
	     Use 100baseTX, full duplex

     media 100baseTX [mediaopt half-duplex]
	     Use 100baseTX, half duplex

     media 10baseT mediaopt full-duplex
	     Use 10baseT, full duplex

     media 10baseT [mediaopt half-duplex]
	     Use 10baseT, half duplex

HARDWARE

     The txp driver supports the following cards:

	   o   3Com 3CR990-TX-95
	   o   3Com 3CR990-TX-97
	   o   3Com 3cR990B-TXM
	   o   3Com 3CR990SVR95
	   o   3Com 3CR990SVR97
	   o   3Com 3cR990B-SRV

SEE ALSO

     altq(4), arp(4), inet(4), intro(4), ip(4), miibus(4), tcp(4), udp(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

     The txp driver first appeared in OpenBSD 2.9.

BSD
								  March 12, 2009							       BSD