[NTLUG:Discuss] network card question

[Chris Cox]

David Evans wrote:
> hello all,
> i am using suse 9.1 and my nic card is built onto a intel p4 mother 
> board. Where do i look in the suse to make sure the nic card is set to 
> 100 full duplex
> or better yet just see what the settings are?

In general, you don't ever hard configure your card with regards
to speed/duplex.  If one side (router/switch) is set to auto
negotiate, you'll end up with that side configuring down to
10mbit/half (probably not want you want).

There is NO generic ethernet support in Linux.  Some tools will
work with eth-tool or mii-diag, others simply will not... but in general
those are the most popular tools to find out what you autonegotiated
at.  If the other side is hard configured (not autonegotiate), then
you'll probably have to either pass parameters to the ethernet
module on load (try modinfo <name-of-module>... no guarantees) or
use mii-tool/eth-tool (which doesn't work for all ethernet chipsets).

Apart from Cisco, most of the world handles auto-negotiation
fairly well.