Never force full duplex.

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Dan Stromberg wrote:

> >       Never force full duplex.
>
> I'm inclined to trust you on this Don, but I'd appreciate it if you
> could tell us more about the reasoning that went into this conclusion.
> I'm hesitant to recommend things on authority; I much prefer to
> understand (at least) a little bit about what I'm recommending.
> 
> Are you thinking that any switch that neglects autonegotiation, probably
> also neglects to have a decent FD implementation?

The problem is the long-term one.  A single forced-full-duplex machine on
a repeater will cause every other machine to get out-of-window and other
errors.  The culprit never reports errors, only the properly configured
machines get errors (and the driver/OS is blamed).

Full duplex is usually not a signifcant performance gain for
workstation-like usage.

Donald Becker
Scyld Computing Corporation, becker@scyld.com

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