Hello,
Clearly no one can help however I feel that some of you may be interested in the following.
I have recently run into two devices that appear to report ethernet collisions as interface output errors.
- Nokia firewall IPSO 3.8
- Some Cisco switch or router (sorry did not make a note of it at the time).
In the nokia case I had no immediate access to the device connected to the Nokia via a point to point link.
The Nokia was set to FD and was reporting Input errors I set it to HD and then got output errors. All via Voyager GUI.
Then I noticed that netstat -ni showed that number of collisions = number of errors.
snmp mibs (interface, transmission.dot3) agreed that there were no late collisions.
Setting the Nokia to HD reduced the rate of lost packets by a factor of about 100. i.e. eliminated them.
The Cisco similarly reported the same number of collisions as output errors, no late collisions and I had confidence that the link was good for reasons that I now forget.
I conclude:- The two poisons, namely 'Collisions Are Bad, Very Bad' and 'Half Duplex is Useless, Completely Useless' have reached new levels of power and are irresistable.
The only fix (other than re-education, which can never succeed in this matter) is to banish HD Ethernet from your network.
This seems a good argument for GBE (or ATM:) to the desk.
Is in not amazing that two of the biggest mistakes (and indeed they may be the only significant errors) in the Ethernet (802.3) standards appear to have been social errors and not technical errors.
I refer of course to. a) The selection of the term collision. b) The Duplex auto-negotiation behaviour.
The latter has resulted in I guess millions and millions of functionaly impaired links due to the social inevitability that 'FD is best' and must be hand configured by any concientions system admin while they simultaneously don't bother to ensure that all devices are so configured.