Disabling Auto-negotiation

Did anyone happen to see the recent article by blogger Joel Spolsky which in passing seems to advise disabling auto-negotiation in "mission critical" environments?

Paragraphs 7-9 contain the part I'm curious about.

I infer from the article that Joel's company disables auto- negotiation as a matter of policy on all Ethernet equipment in their data center. Is that a common practice? Would you recommend it? (I know that there were compatibility problems with different implementations when auto-negotiation was first introduced, but I assume we're talking about "modern" equipment ;-)

BTW, the conclusion of the "Ethernet Autonegotiation Best Practices" document from SUN Microsystems is a recommendation to leave auto- negotiation enabled, but I'm not sure they are addressing the same "mission critical" installation issue Joel Spolsky is talking about. (See

I also wonder about the analysis that auto-negotiation was the cause of the failure. There aren't any details in the article, but the link in question was up for some time and then failed. If it was working properly for a time, presumably auto-negotiation also worked when the link came up. How could auto-negotiation have caused it to fail later? (I'm not saying it couldn't. I just wonder how it could have.)

I'd appreciate your comments.

Dave

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Posted 5 years ago by David Tiktin in Ethernet LAN

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