[vortex] 3c905C not auto-negotiating full duplex 100BaseT

[Henri SASLAWSKY]

|When you configure the switch to 100-FD, is the card also forced to this
|speed or is it autonegotiating or left at the default setting ?
|If you configure the switch to autonegotiation while the card has a forced
|speed, the card will report correctly the local speed, but only sometimes
|the partner speed; this depends on the transceiver.
|
|> I'm all for writing values to the EEPROM, if only I know what...
|
|Are you really not able to run DOS in order to use 3Com's utility ? It's
|by far simpler and more error-proof than using vortex-diag...

The problem is all cleared up. I am only writing this for closure for the
web archives, in case anyone else winds up with this problem.

I am pretty certain that the card was delivered, configured to 10baseT
half-duplex. I doubt this happened at the factory. The fact that the server
started out its life loaded with Windows may have something to do with
it...

I managed to dig up the 3com vortex (MS-DOS) support tool (at the following
page)

     http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/3c905c.htm

(aside: if this link is on Donald Becker's vortex page, it certainly wasn't
in an obvious location.).

The EXE file is an archive which contains all sorts of goodies. It should
be run in an empty directory. The only thing you need is the 3com*.* files
in the base directory. Copy them over to a bootable DOS disk and reboot the
machine. The program is very simple to use.

In my case it showed the card set to 10baseT. I changed that to autoneg,
rebooted, and now I have a nice wide pipe to my server.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The end.