Netgear FA310tx defaulting to 1/2 duplex -- yes, it SHOULD

Donald Becker becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
Tue Jan 4 13:15:35 2000


On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Edward Zarecor wrote:

> I am putting together a small home network of machines running RH 6.1 
> and/or WinNT.  My firewall machine has two Netgear FA310tx auto-sensing 
> ethernet cards one of which is connected to a DSL modem, the other to my 
> LAN via 10/100 autosensing hub.  The network is up and running, but the 
> FA310x's are defaulting to half duplex.  Should I:
> 
> a: specifiy the media type in conf.modules.
> 
> b. recompile the tulip driver after changing the full-duplex flag
> 
> c. none of the above.

Acckkkk!!
Well, at least you asked instead of reporting a bug later.

The driver is working correctly.
All of your connections *should* be half duplex.
Forcing full duplex will cause massive performance and correctness problems.

'Ping' will work, and everything else will be horribly slow and unreliable.
Some types of network cards will freeze for a seconds at a time when
presented with out-of-window collisions.

On an unrelated topic, I'm working today on updating the "kern-2.3" drivers
to work with the recent development kernels.

Donald Becker
Scyld Computing Corporation, and
USRA-CESDIS,   becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov

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