Re: Intel Gigabit problem

["Stephen Carville" <carville cpl net>]

Try mii-tool to check the settings on your NIC.

I rarely have a problem with desktop Linux boxes and portfast.  Laptops
are another story :-).  Log in on the switch and watch the messages. If
you see something like:

port n/m joined bridge port n/m
port n/m left brifge port n/m

repeating, then try setting set portfast to on.

set spantree portfast n/m enable

Mark Denni said:
> I have 8 Dell PowerEdge 1650 servers with Intel Gigabit
> Network Interface chips on board. They are connected
> at 100 MB/sec to a Cisco switch, model WS-C3524-XL.
>
> Because of nfs instabilities we switched over to 3COM
> nic cards. Now that we found that the instability could
> be solved by changing kernel parameters, we want to go
> back to using the onboard interface. (See
> http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3183.html#0 for
> more info about optimizing NFS under Linux.)
>
> But I find that when I switch the card out and reconfigure
> the bios to activate the Intel interface, sometimes the
> network comes up for a minute and then stops working, and
> sometimes it doesn't come up at all.  If I reinstall
> completely using the Dell Server Assistant CD, it seems
> to come up every time.  But I'd rather not do that.
>
> Perhaps there's an autonegotiation problem, or perhaps
> the Portfast setting on the switch should be set a certain
> way.  How in Linux, do you check the status of the Speed
> and Duplexing of a network interface? I found that
> modinfo -p e1000 gives me a list of what the parameters
> could be set to, but I want to verify what they are actually
> set to.
>
> Any ideas gratefully accepted.
>
> - Mark Denni


-- 
Stephen Carville http://www.heronforge.net/~stephen/gnupgkey.txt
In the new politics of fear, if terrorists attack the United States
because of our greater freedom and respect for religious diversity,
then we must destroy freedom and diversity.