Networking fun
November 12th, 2009
For the last week we were only getting 4Mb/s to one of our test servers, which was actually supposed to have 100Mb/s rates. Transferring installation media is really a lot of fun that way. After hoping for the last week that the problem would go away on its own, we finally came to the conclusion that this is probably not going to happen any time soon.
So we played with a whole bunch of cables, two switches, one p5 550 with VIO, and a T61p, until we figured out what’s wrong. It just took us a whole day to figure it out, but it feels good that we did.
The root-cause was that auto-negotiation was disabled on the ethernet interface. Usually this is a good thing. This time it was not. Go figure.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:11am CET
it is only a good thing if both ends are of that opinion (configured that way) … :)