On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Rick Kelly wrote:

> >I'm trying to figure out why the  SunFastEthernet-1.0 (bigmac/be0) card I
> >just bought won't run in 100baseTX mode. It appears to get detected
> >correctly and boots up in 100baseTX mode, but pings to the outside world
> >don't resolve. Bringing the interface down, switching to "media
> >10baseT", and bringing it back up solves the problem. If I repeat the
> >process back to "media 100baseTX", the LED on my network switch does this
> >weird flickering like it doesn't know whats plugged into it and 'ifconfig be0'
> >shows "status: no carrier".
>
> Sounds like your switch has problems with 100TX half-duplex.
>
Hummm. Maybe that's it, but isn't the AUI interface a half-duplex device?

Anyways, I've had a breakthrough - the network looks like this:

[clients]---[switch]---[SMC_Router]---[Linksys_Router]---(internet)
[clients]------------|  [clients]---|

All the clients behind the switch have /etc/mygate set to the SMC_Router,
which inturn, reference the Linksys_Router (gateway) and the appropriate
DNSs. They all work just fine, but for some reason this BigMac/SS5 client
just isn't getting the same gateway info that the others get (at least not
in 100baseTX mode; in 10baseT it does). However, things started working when
I changed /etc/mygate to Linksys_Router. Another thing I noticed was that
if I changed the "local-mac-address?" OB env.var. to "true", I didn't get
that stuttering LED on the switch. I guess I need to learn more WRT
TCP/IP handshakes, etc.

Anyways, its working and I learned something, so I'm happy :)

Cheers,
Beaker