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Date:      Tue, 1 Feb 2000 22:48:59 -0700
From:      "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org>
To:        freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   anyone know about 802.3x flow control?
Message-ID:  <20000201224859.A38780@panzer.kdm.org>

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I've got an Intel 410T standalone switch for my home network:

http://www.intel.com/network/products/exp410t.htm

I've got four machines hooked to it, which have:

Card			Speed			Driver
no-name DEC 21140A	100Mbps, full duplex	de
SMC 8216		10Mbps, half duplex	ed
Intel 82559		100Mbps, full duplex	fxp
HP JetDirect		100Mbps, full duplex	(it's a printer)

Everything works fine, but I noticed something odd on the machine with 
the Intel ethernet board tonight.  It was getting tons of packets every
second (several screens full) from the switch.

The packets looked like this in tcpdump:

22:15:53.313742 0:0:0:0:0:10 1:80:c2:0:0:1 8808 60:
                         0001 0000 0000 8808 0001 0000 0000 8808
                         0001 0000 0000 8808 0001 0000 0000 8808
                         0001 0000 0000 8808 0001 0000 0000
22:15:53.355673 0:0:0:0:0:10 1:80:c2:0:0:1 8808 60:
                         0001 0000 0000 8808 0001 0000 0000 8808
                         0001 0000 0000 8808 0001 0000 0000 8808
                         0001 0000 0000 8808 0001 0000 0000

The last octet of the source hardware address changes based on what port in
the switch I'm plugged into.  (It's in port 10 now.  If I plug it into say
port 11, it'll be 0x20, 12, 0x30, and so on.)

I ran tcpdump on the other two FreeBSD boxes (with the SMC and DEC cards),
and didn't notice any packets like that.  So my guess was that it must be
some autonegotiated parameter between the switch and the card that caused
that to happen.

So I went into the switch configuration menu (via the serial port) and
disabled flow control on port 10.  The packets above stopped.  Now,
occasionally (once every minute or two, maybe?) I get packets like this:

22:40:13.958917 ff:ff:ff:ff:0:90 2:0:0:0:ff:ff 27d1 322: 
                         7776 0800 4500 0130 cf09 0000 4011 95b3
                         0a00 0002 0a00 00ff 0201 0201 011c 4e86
                         0101 0000 3897 c33d 0000 0000 7061 6e7a
                         6572 0000 0000

I assume the above storm of packets was due to the "IEEE 802.3x
standards-based flow control." that the switch supports, but what I don't
understand is why the packets kept coming.

Is this something that the card is supposed to intercept somehow and deal
with, or is it something that the OS is supposed to intercept and deal
with?  I'd guess the latter, but I'd like to know more about it, and
perhaps why my switch kept spewing.  (Naturally, Intel's web site didn't
have much helpful information that I could find.)

Anyone know anything about this?

Thanks,

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken@kdm.org


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