Juniper e3k with ports limitied to 100Mbit and re NICs on MSI MoBo: problems with duplex negotiation (Hetzner host provider discard FreeBSD support due this bug)

[Brian Reichert]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:47:29PM +0300, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> Hello, Freebsd-net.
> 
>   Very large and famous (due to very attractive prices) hosting
>  provider Hetzner.de discards FreeBSD support on dedicated servers,
>  because these servers can niot negotiate 100Mbit/DUPLEX when
>  switches' ports are limited to 100Mbit (1Gbit connection costs
>  additional money) only under FreeBSD. Linux works fine.

How are the switches being forced to 100/full?

If they're doing so by disabling autonegotiation, then that's where
some grief may come from.

If it's not, then ignore the rest of this email. :)

For certain hardware combos, I've seen even Linux servers (on Dell
hardware) fail to autonegotiate properly.

Here's the set of litany I trot out when I have to deal with
customer's issues surrounding gigabit and autonegotiation:

-------------

With the advent of 1000T networking, the specs says that autonegotation
needs to be enabled:

http://etherealmind.com/2008/07/15/ethernet-autonegotiation-works-why-how-standard-should-be-set/

  " A major problem is that many people are also hard setting Gigabit
  Ethernet, and this is causing major problems. Gigabit Ethernet
  must have auto-negotiation ENABLED to allow negotiation of master
  / slave PHY relationship for clocking at the physical layer.
  Without negotiation the line clock will not establish correctly
  and physical layers problems can result."

Further, this doc from Dell:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/power/en/ps1q01_hernan?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Cites:

  "In addition, the 1999 standard for Gigabit over copper cabling,
  IEEE Std 802.3ab, added the following enhancements to the
  Auto-Negotiation standard:"

    * Mandatory auto-negotiation for 1000BaseT
    * Configure master and slave modes for the PHY

Further:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonegotiation

  "The debatable portions of the autonegotiation specifications
  were eliminated by the 1998 version of IEEE 802.3. In 1999, the
  negotiation protocol was significantly extended by IEEE 802.3ab,
  which specified the protocol for gigabit Ethernet, making
  autonegotiation mandatory for 1000BASE-T gigabit Ethernet over
  copper."

> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-net at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

-- 
Brian Reichert				<reichert at numachi.com>
55 Crystal Ave. #286			
Derry NH 03038-1725 USA			BSD admin/developer at large