Hello,
 
I wanted to give people a heads-up about setting NIC parameters on release
SL303 or greater. This is something we found by accident and it wasted time on
our end resolving system configurations.

There are two ways to set NIC configuration once the driver is loaded,
mii-tools and/or ethtool. You can also configure a NIC within
/etc/modules.conf.  For example, for the e1000 driver, this would load and set
the NIC:

alias eth0 e1000
options e1000 Speed=1000 Duplex=2,2

for the e100:

alias eth0 e1000
options e100 e100_speed_duplex=4,4

and the eepro100 driver for the e100 card:

alias eth0 e1000
options eepro100 full_duplex=1 options=0x30,0x30

etc.

mii-tool works with parameters like the 'option' line. So for eth0 as an e1000
you do:

mii-tool -s eth0 Speed=1000 Duplex=2,2

All network drivers (according to RH) now support ethtool in addition to
mii-tool and driver specific options, but you'd probably want to use ethtool
configure syntax. For example, to set NIC speed, duplex, and autoneg add this
line:

ETHTOOL_OPTS="autoneg off speed 100 duplex full"

to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth(n)

for any card, this will set autoneg, speed and duplex. It doesn't matter what
card it is as long as it's not in the 'unsupported' kernel, it will
bend to the will of 'she that must be obeyed' (that config line). Of
course, you need to know the settings on the port, but this greatly
simplifies the process for large sets of systems.

Hope this helps,
John



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# John Goebel <jgoebel(at)slac.stanford.edu> #
# Stanford Linear Accelerator Center         #
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