Marvell chipsets on 8-CURRENT and XP x64 won't talk with one another

[Mike Silbersack]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Garrett Cooper wrote:

>> Just to clarify, how are the two hooked together?  Is it over gigabit 
>> switch, a 10mbps hub, or directly cabled together?
>> 
>> -Mike
>
>   Sure. They're both connected over a gigabit switch, but the Windows 
> driver's kind of sketchy because it keeps on switching between 100MBit and 
> 1GBit. I haven't really paid that much attention to what speed the FreeBSD 
> msk driver is registering at.
> -Garrett

Ah ha!

I had the flopping between 100mbps and 1gbps problem with some Intel cards 
once - some of the machines in the lab were fine, others kept switching 
back and forth.  We eventually narrowed it down to the cables we had 
hand-made; some of them just weren't up to snuff, and the NIC apparently 
decided that it had to go back down to 100.

I think you should switch your gigabit switch out for a 100mbps switch and 
see if the network becomes more reliable.

-Mike