> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Davina Treiber wrote:
> 
> DT> Oscar Olsson wrote:
> DT> > On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Ty Young wrote:
> DT> > 
> DT> > TY> I would say 98% is quite good.
> DT> > TY> TY> In my experience the Windows clients talk very nicely with 
> Windows
> DT> > or UNIX
> DT> > TY> backup servers (NetWorker) and the failures I've seen with clients 
> are
> DT> > TY> usually due to
> DT> > TY> TY> (a) client NICs left at auto-negotiate instead of being forced
> DT> > 100/full
> DT> > 
> DT> > Say what? Using anything else than auto-negotiation is stupid. Auto
> DT> > negotiation has been a non-issue since the late 90s. However, I have 
> seen
> DT> > plenty of examples where a clueless administrator has turned off
> DT> > auto-negotiation on the client, but left auto negotiation on on the
> DT> > switch. This ofcourse results in that the switch will regard the port as
> DT> > being in 100mbit/hdx mode, which will result in plenty of late 
> collisions
> DT> > and really poor performance.
> DT> > 
> DT> > Please make yourself and the systems users a favour by using autoneg
> DT> > everywhere.
> DT> I beg to differ. I find it much more reliable to force everything to 
> 100/FD.
> DT> Auto-neg settings are the number one cause of slow and intermttently 
> failing
> DT> backups in most of the environments I have worked in, especially for 
> Windows
> DT> clients.
> 
> OK, you are the second one who tells me this. But I still claim that I 
> have seen several cases of poor performance in different brand 
> environments where speed and duplex has been set inconsistently. This 
> includes Cisco, HP and D-link switches.

And here is a third one!
I installed 10 -20 bigger Networker systems last year and saw
about 50% of these failing to negotiate decently under auto-negostiate.
Usually they ended up with one end 100/half and the other 100/full.

So IMHO it is really stupid to trust the auto-stuff. And most of the times
you dont't even nitice the poor performance until installing Networker...

And it is REALLY hard to convince the network-guys that Their Network
has a flaw in it ;-)

Dag

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