[rescue] FDDI vs switched 100BaseTX, vs SPARC LX

[Loomis, Rip]

Brian--
The switch is a D-Link 5-port managed switch,
VLAN-capable, which *does* auto-negotiate.
I'm going to see if there's any sort of a
firmware upgrade for it, though, that might
address this problem.  We've seen similar
problems with le* interfaces plugged into
Cisco Catalyst switches here at work, so
I really do think that the problems are on
the Sun side rather than on the switch side.
The work-around may still be on the switch
side, though (which it has been in the past).

Has anyone ever gotten an le* interface to
successfully auto-negotiate with *any* switch
capable of 100Mbps full-duplex?  I've gotten
this particular switch (and others with
similar behavior) to work with 3C509 ISA
cards and properly auto-negotiate--it seems
to be only the le* drivers.  Haven't yet
had a chance to test under *BSD or Linux
to see if it's an issue specific to Solaris,
and I can't find much on the web that seems
directly relevant.

This is really a last-ditch effort to try to
fix the broken side of things based on what I
think is really b0rken.

--
Rip Loomis
Senior Systems Security Engineer, SAIC CIST
Brainbench MVP for Internet Security
http://www.brainbench.com  [Transcript 1923411]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Hechinger [mailto:wonko at arkham.ws]
>
> the real fix is to get the switch to auto-negotiate.
> barring that, forcing the port will do the trick.
> 
> > After cruising around the web, I think I'll
> > try some ndd incantations based on info in
> >   http://www.netsys.com/sunmgr/1997-01/msg00000.html
> 
> this won't help you.  this is for the problem that a lot of
> Sun hme hardware has with properly autonegotiating with certain
> switches.  the LX is 10/half, that's it, so it isn't going to
> try and autonegotiate, but the switch need to be able to figure
> it out.

I understand that the incantations listed on that page are
fixes for a different problem...but since it *does* get
a link light and then the auto-negotiation (apparently)
fails, I'm hoping that I can finagle things by hand.
It would seem worth a try...