Cisco 4507R and Broadcom NetXtreme NICs

Not to suggest the obvious, but have you hard coded both sides (switch & server) to 1000/full per cisco best practices. While auto/auto on both sides is also acceptable (for gig only), you should really stick to a plan of hard coding both sides as it makes for better long term support, documentation, and maintenance.

Not sure this is true for GigE.

although a lot of devices had problems with 100 Base-TX, the IEEE standard says auto is mandatory for 1000 Base-T, since it is used to sort out master / slave etc.

Even on GigE fibre where the 2 devices dont have to negotiate, some devices will not work unless auto- negotiate is enabled on the other device - I stumbled across this on a Foundry L3 switch recently, connecting to a GigE on an SDH mux.

While auto/auto on

i think with GigE you are likely to find at least as many places where disabling auto is going to cause problems rather than solve them.

I agree with you, although if he's having issues with auto, he might as well try hard-coding. There is no one answer with gig, but you have to set both sides to the same regardless of which way you go. At my previous employer, we had a lot of issues with IBM boxes on boot and auto-mdix. The command was hidden, but we had tier 3 at TAC and IBM on the phone and no one knew enough to own up. All I can tell you is those damn Regattas were sending some kind of pulse that caused auto-mdix to trip, and we eventually had to set auto-mdix to disable on all our switch ports for these boxes. Fixed the problem right away, although never got an official explanation.

I have never seen an issue where hardcoding was a problem with gige or not. I always hardcode sp/dpx, and I have seen at least 4 ibm servers where throughput was down to about one meg when auto was used.

stephen wrote:

I had understood (though I can't find a reference just now) that matching negotiation stances was required in all kinds of GigE, thus avoiding the duplex mismatch problem you get with 10/100 ethernet. That is, if one end tries to negotiate and the other won't then the link won't come up, though that does lead to the weird-seeming situation where the hard-set end of the link comes up and the negotiating one doesn't.

Even on 10/100 we're beginning to find more problems with disabling auto than with setting it - we're probably going to change to auto by default for all our servers.

Sam

Hello all, Thanks for replying. There is no way to hard set gigabite on the cards or the Cisco 4507R. If you issue the speed command on the cisco box to configure the port to gigabit ethernet, It will default to AUTO. If you look at the properties of the NIC, there is no place to choose

1000 / FULL Duplex except to pick auto. This is why my problem is so weird. I have the same setup > In article ,

Hello all, Thanks for replying. There is no way to hard set gigabite on the cards or the Cisco 4507R. If you issue the speed command on the cisco box to configure the port to gigabit ethernet, It will default to AUTO. If you look at the properties of the NIC, there is no place to choose

1000 / FULL Duplex except to pick auto. This is why my problem is so weird. I have the same setup > In article ,

Suggest posting the output of show module and show diag from a problem- free switch and same froma troubled switch

I know that you have checked/changed the cables but I thought I would mention that GBE uses all 4 pairs in CATx and 100M uses only two.

Bad cables WILL cause this exact symptom. I would want to very carefully check cabling end to end for correct pairing for a start. Easiset way for me would be to use known "good" GBE devices.