SUMMARY: Apparent flow control problem between Gigaswift cards an d Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch

Ok, thanks to everyone for responses.  No solutions and also no-one who is
successfully using this particularl configuration...no-one reported my exact
problem, either.  A few people reported trouble with the gigaswift card as
well, but those problems are related to autonegotiation and can happen with
the older gig cards as well.  Sun has a workaround for autonegotiation
problems:  info doc 41728.

My problem, as described below, is still not solved as such, but I replaced
the gigaswift card, which uses the ce driver, with an older card, X1141A,
and the problem cleared right up.  This isn't the greatest solution, as the
older card is fiber only, and it leaves me with 6 gigaswift cards to replace
before I can get my farm up and running...sigh.  But it's better than no gig
at all.

I get the X1141a cards from www.solarsystems.com - I'm pretty sure they're
obsolete and can't be got from sun any more.

A lot of folks sent me ndd commands for turning on/off autonegotiation from
the command line and emphasised doing the commands in the right order.
Probably an easier solution in the long run is to set up the driver to do
all that for you:  info doc 72033  has instructions, in case anyone wants
them.

Thanks,
Mary Dell
Server Administrator
Mesirow Financial

-----Original Message-----
From: Dell, Mary 
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 1:17 PM
To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
Subject: Apparent flow control problem between Gigaswift cards and Cisco
Catalyst 6500 switch


Hi,

I have an E220R running Solaris 9 with a fiber gig card with the ce driver.
When I hook it to one of our Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches, I get link but
there are a lot of errors on the port. Specifically, FCS-Err and Runts are
incrementing.  There are no collisions and no errors of any kind on my
machine, but I experience icky, herky-jerky telnet and gui behavior.  Plus
my nightly legato backups, which is what I use this machine for, are hanging
up more than they did when I had it on a cat 5 connection.

Everything points to a duplexing mismatch, except that I don't seem to have
a duplexing mismatch - according to my networking guys the switch can only
do full duplex, while my server says it's set to 1000fdx and the fdx light
on the NIC is on.

My networking guys found doc at Cisco about various switches not
autonegotiating properly with "some" Sun, IBM, and HP gig nics, so we turned
off autoneg on both ends and diddled around with flow control settings for a
day and a half without any improvement, although by turning off flow control
entirely we were able to make it a lot worse.

I would suspect a pinched cable or something like that, but I have the same
problem on another E220R that has a copper-based gig nic, also with the ce
driver, also with a catalyst 6500 switch (but not the same one, which rules
out a busted switch)  I never got that resolved.

I have another machine on the same switch, an E3000 with a gigabit fiber
card, that works fine, but this is a little older, not "gigaswift" -- it
uses the ge driver.

So, my questions are 
(1) has anyone else had a problem like this, where symptoms point to a
duplexing mismatch but actual settings are correct?
(2) is anyone using the x1141 gigabit card with an E220R - that would be the
older, non-gigaswift one - and if so, does it behave ok with Cisco switches?
Any reason I should avoid buying it to use instead of the X3151?
(3) is anyone successfully using the X3151(fiber) or X3150 (copper) with a
cisco catalyst 6500 switch?  Can you send me your driver settings?  If you
don't know how to capture them, email me and I'll send instructions.

Thanks in advance for advice - hunches and wild ideas are also welcome, I'm
supposed to get this running within a week!  Please email me with anything
and I'll summarize.

thanks,
Mary Dell


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