From owner-freebsd-stable  Wed Apr 15 18:21:13 1998
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To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: various PCI Ethernet cards v.s. SMC Ethernet switches.... 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 15 Apr 1998 16:22:10 EDT."
             <199804152022.QAA00253@brain.zeus.leitch.com> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 18:20:27 -0700
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>We're seeing some exceptionally weird (and bad) behaviour from at least
>the de driver, and sometimes the tx driver too.
>
>We have an SMC EZ-Switch 8+2 (6408TT), which is unfortunately a very
>dumb and unmanaged switch (no knobs, few lights, and no stats reports).

   I think the problem is either with the cables or with the switch (or
switch port configuration). I'm not very confident about the de and tx
drivers, but as the author of the fxp driver, I'm very confident that there
isn't anything wrong with that. The first thing to do would be to isolate
the problem down to the side of the switch that is causing problems - either
the 10Mbps side or the 100Mbps uplink side. The problem you're describing
sounds like an error in autonegotiation or otherwise incorrectly configured
duplex. I'm not familiar with the SMC switch, but if you can't get it to
autonegotiate correctly, then I'd try manually setting all of the ports to
half duplex (including the FreeBSD interface). Perhaps the 100Mbps uplink
port is configured for full duplex? If so, that would be a problem since
it's connected to a hub which is inherently half duplex.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project

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