netstat -ni - A lot of collisions...

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 09:37:26PM +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> We've had a series of Broadcomm bge(4) network interfaces that would
> arbitrarily stop working if hardwired to 100-full, but that are doing
> just fine when allowed to autoneg.  Switches are mostly HP Procurve if
> that makes any difference.

Interesting.  I've got a ProCurve 2524 in our co-lo with tons of
FreeBSD boxes hooked to it, all of which behave correctly via auto-neg.
The FreeBSD boxes use a slew of NICs; em, fxp, and xl.  The uplink
port on our 2524 to our ISP, however, has to be set to 100/full on
both ends (theirs and ours; theirs = Cisco, ours = HP) or else we
end up with framing errors and other nonsense.

For sake of comparison, I have sitting in my workroom a bge-based
box hooked up to a ProCurve 2626 which behaves properly via auto-neg
on both the 100mbit and the gigabit ports (I've tried both).  I
have not tried hard-setting them, since auto-neg seems to work.

However, the instant I hook that box up to my Hawking non-managed
gigabit switch (which is a switch where auto-neg has worked with
every NIC I've tried until now), the switch and NIC auto-neg
correctly to 1gb/full... except packets appear busted in some way:
packets make it to the switch (one can see the LEDs blinking), yet
the IP stack doesn't see anything in return.  ARP also does not show
anything.  The fact that auto-neg is working, and that the switch
indicates correct speed and duplex, makes me think this is some
weird bge driver problem.  Wiring is all CAT6, and obviously works
fine with another switch.

If I set `media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex` and reboot, everything
works (at 100mbit of course) with that box.

I'd love to give a kernel developer access to that box via serial
console so they could debug what the heck is going on with auto-neg
in that particular case.  :-)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |