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To Auto-Neg, Full Duplex or Half Duplex

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by brian.pyle

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My network has all switched hubs. Servers have the option to set the Nic card to auto negotiate or select 10 or 100Mps. It was suggested to me that I can cut down on network traffic and increase speed by changing this setting to 100. Any comments. Also, should I be set to full duplex or half duplex or auto negotiate??? and why.

5 replies

by computechie

If all of your switches and network cards are capable of 100 mbit, then they should be negotiating to 100mbit anyway. If any of them aren't, and are connecting at 10mbit between devices then you need to do a little investigating to see why. I leave all the NIC's on the network I adminster on auto-negotiate, and at half duplex. The only time that I would use full duplex, is if your using top of the line hardware (i.e. companies like 3Com), and your absolutly sure that all cabling is in good condition. I did an experiment in a room on the network I administer setting all of them to full duplex, and beleive it or not, it actually brang that room to a crawl. I would stay with your current auto-negotiate and keep them at half duplex, which is probably the default. Hope this helps.

by wanabedrsean

The auto negoyiate is best because it will eliminate the most problems with the network but if you do set everything to full duplex at 100Mb it will speed up the network but all the nics will have to be able to use this setting to work if there are any 10Mb cards on the network they will not work unles the switches are auto negotiating connections then you wont have any problems . what will speed up the net work more is to als have more than one colision domain and put each colision domain an its own network card in the server.

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