[olug] Ethernet Auto-negotiation and Duplexing on Linux

[Phil Brutsche]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> Ethertool was unable to set the autoneg, duplex, and speed options for the old
> NE2000 compatible NIC's.

I'm not surprised.  Quite frequently NE2000 and compatibles only support
10baseT (half-duplex, 10Mbit).

> I swapped the old NIC's out for new Intel 10/100 cards and ethertool
> seems to function with the new NIC's.

As I would expect.

> My two options are a) use ethertool to set the parameters or b) use the
> correct string for the Intel driver passed along in (/etc/modules?) directly
> to the card.
>
> I chose to use ethertool, and it claims it was able to pass the parameters
> along to the Ethernet device.
>
> My questions are, should I trust ethertool?

Yes.

Use it like this:

ethtool -s <device> speed 10 duplex full

The mii-tool equivalent would be:

mii-tool -F 10baseT-FD <device>

> And, does anyone have experience with turning auto-negotiation off on an
> Ethernet device under Linux?

I do, if you can't tell by now ;)

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us