What exactly will happen if a port configured for full duplex only tries to talk to one capable of half duplex only?
I tried taking a HP Procurve switch, connected a full duplex uplink from the
100Mb. port to the rest of my network, configured one of the 10 Mb. ports to full duplex, and connected it to a port on a Netgear 10Mb. hub, obviously half duplex. I then connected another port on the hub to a PC, and tried to access the network through this mismatched connection. Sometimes I seemed to get a reasonable connection, sometimes a very slow transfer, sometimes the liink light would come and go, and once the whole Procurve locked up, I couldn't get a link to anything, and I had to re-boot it. That surprised me somewhat. What exactly was happening? Why did the results vary, And would the problems have got worse if I had connected more devices to the hub?