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Catalyst switches and Broadcom NICs

Hi All,

Has anyone had any problems connecting servers or PCs that use a Broadcom

570x 10/100/1000 Gigabit NIC to any of the Catalyst 2900, 4500, 6500 series? For some time we have been experiencing speed and/or duplex problems when connecting the above NICs to any of the above switches. We hard-code the speed and duplex on both ends, yet the problem still exists. In some cases, if you set one side or the other to "auto/auto" then you get whatever speed and duplex the other side is set to. Sometime this works, sometimes it doesn't. This problem is not specific to one type of port on the Catalyst. It affects both the FastE and the GigE ports.

To answer the obvious questions, yes we have tried different NICs, and different patch cables, and even entirely different cable runs. We have tried multiple ports on multiple switches to no avail. To only thing that we are running that might be considered "non-standard" is spanning-tree portfast on the ports. I don't recall if we have tried running a test without this, but I don't think that it would cause the symptoms that we are seeing. Other NIC brands (Intel, 3Com, etc) are not effected.

Any ideas? All thoughts are appreciated!!!

Regards,

Richard Graves

Reply to
Richard Graves
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I have not seen any problems with setting the speed and duplex at 10 or 100 on broadcom NICs. To connect at Gigabit, you MUST set both sides to auto or it won't work.

Scott

Reply to
thrill5

Hi !

Today I experienced the same problem as yours... It was with a Broadcom

570x (I don't remember exactly which one it was) and a Cisco Catalyst 4500. When autonegociation is used, the link speed is 100 Half Duplex. When set to 100 M Full on both sides, it works...

But I experienced another problem : with servers using Broadcom NIC, we are losing packets, particularly when TCP connection take a long time. In fact, we have problem with 2 SMTP servers. Mails incoming on the first server (which have broadcom NIC) don't encountered any problem (it seems). But when the first server delivers mails to the second (which has no Broadcom NIC), several connections are correctly established but never freed. A packet capture shows me that after a certain amount of data, the connection stays open and never closes. The ACK/FIN is never sent. And when the number of blocked connections reach 20, the mail trafic between the servers is stopped (the second server authorize only 20 connections).

The packet capture shows us that there were a lot of TCP retransmission from the broadcom NIC too.

Do you think my problems come from an incompatibility between the switch and the NIC ? Or are these NIC a little bit bugged ??

We had tried the latest drivers for the NIC and it wasn't better... The OS of server is Win2000...

Thx for your answers and sorry for my bad english

NP

Le Fri, 13 May 2005 01:07:26 +0000, Richard Graves a écrit :

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PLANCKAERT Nicolas

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