Comments on: Network Dictionary – Mythinformation

By: Ivan Brunello

Ivan Brunello — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:22:04 +0000

Just two notes:
1) Never dealt with OOOOOLD cabling, which still uses 2-pairs patches on PC110 connectors. Well, we had to manually force our gigabit switch to run 100 FD.

2) On the other hand, talking about Cisco equipment, I found old FastEthernet switches were really a mess w/ autosensing; it worked no more than 50% of cases.
BUT, autonegotiation on gigabit-class ones (not only against gigabit hosts, but also down to FastEthernet) was indeed really working.

By: Autonegotiation on Ethernet – it works, it should be mandatory! | My Etherealmind

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:19:13 +0000

[...] Let me say it again: This is mythinformation. [...]

By: Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:34:05 +0000

“My experiences arenít mythical; I prefer to think of them as legendary”

Great line, just brilliant.

By: Jeff Darcy

Jeff Darcy — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:59:47 +0000

There’s a pattern here: you haven’t *personally* seen something so you dismiss it as a myth. Well, I’ve seen the things you claim are mythical. I have several dozen I/O nodes in my lab at work, each of which is a real-life counterexample to your “1GE worth of HBA traffic” claim. The kicker is that, on an individual basis, each of those nodes is not very expensive or powerful. This laptop could beat one on most tasks. Clearly it’s the *non*existence of such things that’s a myth. The target has *already* moved.

Yes, you have a different experience. You can stand by your statements all you like, but that doesn’t make them true. My experiences aren’t mythical; I prefer to think of them as legendary.

By: Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:37:07 +0000

I have a different experience. The only autoneg problems I have seen in the last 3 years where when someone else wasn’t using it, or when the cabling was faulty. Hard setting bypassed the faulty cabling, by in the long term it did cause errors and was replaced.

And yes, I and others, still believe that. However, it gonna be pretty subjective, your experience may be with high quality servers with good HBA / TOE / setup parameters and that will make the difference, but most people don’t have that setup or that experience so I still stand by my statement.

I also know that it will not true in the future, but, hey, its a moving target.

By: Jeff Darcy

Jeff Darcy — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:13:45 +0000

I think you could have picked a better example. Autoneg *does* fail on a lot of equipment which is arguably either obsolete or cheap or both, but still quite common even in serious data centers. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, it’s no myth, and don’t go all No True Scotsman on me by saying anything that fails autoneg is obsolete by definition. If you want a real myth, how about the one about the “vast majority” of servers not being able to generate 1GE worth of HBA traffic? That’s apocryphal, false, or old for you.