Re: half-/full-duplex ethernet and ifconfig

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> You're positing a device at the other end which has broken
> autonegotiation *that cannot be turned off*.  I haven't actually seen
> a device like that.  And I've seen a lot of network devices.

I don't think I have either - if you're talking about just the device's
capabilities - though I am by no means confident such devices don't
exist.

However, the device on the other end is not always under your control,
and getting its admins to turn off autoneg, or let you turn it off, can
be, umm, nontrivial.  (Yes, I do work for an ISP, why do you ask?)

> What we did there was to implement a "force" bit that reverted to the
> current behavior.  So if you select media 100baseTX -- only -- and
> don't specify "force" it does what everyone else sane does, and
> restricts autonegotiation to 100baseTX only; if you do say "force",
> it forces the PHY to 100baseTX and refuses to negotiate about it.

This strikes me as an eminently reasonable approach.

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML                mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B