I just came accross a nice Sun Blueprint that addresses and issue that is probably more commonly seen that most people realize but its not really all that well understood.
The Ethernet Autonegotiation Best Practice Blueprint, just released in July addresses in an easy to read form (with some excellent technical details for those that care for it) why its no longer the recommened practice to force ethernet interfaces. This is a problem that I run into more often than I'd like to.
I'd typically run into it when a customer forces their eri interfaces in /etc/system on the SC interface of a Starcat's and then wonder why they have domain communication problems through the SC's. As the blueprint explains, the SC to domain communiation is only 100mbps half-duplex. Forcing it to 100-full makes it look OK until you try to put some stress on it with say, jumpstart. All sorts of bad things can then happen.
Anyways, its a good quick article to read.
Posted by c0t0d0s0.org on September 06, 2004 at 07:08 AM CDT #