Can only the 100Mbs part of a 10/100Mbs router fail?

kend at xan3d.com kend at xan3d.com
Wed Dec 8 15:52:01 EST 2004


>
> "Ken D'Ambrosio" <kend at xanoptix.com> writes:
>
>> is the fact that autonegotiation is an imperfect science.
>
> In what way are the autonegotiation specs. deficient?  Just curious.

While I've never read the RFC, to the best of my knowledge, there's no
problem with the specs, themselves.  Once again, it's a case of "the Devil is
in the details."  I think it's the implementation -- especially cross-vendor
issues -- that's the biggie.  I *know* that, four years ago (wow, time
flies), it would have been incredibly foolhardy to assume that Cisco would
autonegotiate with anything that wasn't Cisco (leastwise, for production
equipment).  I've also seen the occasional, though less frequent, horkage of
other vendors' autonegotiation.  By and large, this is something that's
probably relegated to the past, but when bumping into an issue like this,
it's certainly a problem to be on the lookout for.  [Bad grammar, but hey...]

-Ken




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