[Setup-tool-hackers] Network hardware configuration

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj ximian com>]

Donald Becker has some nifty utilities to control ethernet adapters. This
includes setting the media (10baseT, 10base2, AUI, etc), the duplex, the
speed (100/10Mbit), etc. These actually solved a serious problem I was
having with my local network. The code is GPL, in C, and probably easily
liftable - I looked at it briefly before compiling it.

We should think about some way to use this in the setup tools. People may
experience network problems that are otherwise unfixable. I sure did.

What happens if you have full duplex enabled, but shouldn't: You get packet
loss and TCP/IP speeds down to 4kB/s on 10Mbit networks. What happens if you
have 100Mbit, but shouldn't: All computers on that hub lose networking until
the guilty party is taken off the net. Of course, symptoms will vary with
hub/switch and NIC brands. But generally, these problems are hard to fix when
the autonegotiation doesn't work.

Mr. Becker's programs are just C source files that have to be downloaded and
compiled (no archives, no Makefile). Someone else might have integrated these
utils into a tool of some kind, somewhere, though.

http://www.scyld.com/diag/

--
Hans Petter

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