[Soekris] Compatibility Issue w/ Soekris 5501 and Cisco 2640 Switch

[jmc]

--- Chuck (Doc) Beaudette [Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 01:32:42PM -0700]: --- 
> 
> I have noted what appears to be a compatibility issue between the new
> Soekris and Cisco 2640 switch. I previously had a 4801 in my network
> connected to a Cisco 2640 for customers on a local Fiber network. The 4801
> acted as the router between the fiber switch and our Cisco border router.
> Average 95th percentile traffic was about 15-20mb for customers on this
> network. Customers had good burst rates of 40mb and better. 
> 
> When I replaced the 4801 with a new 5501, the throughput between the Cisco
> 2640 and the Soekris router dropped to next to nothing. We tried several
> different configurations (Auto negotiate, fixed 100mb Full-Duplex, etc.),
> nothing seemed to make any difference. Finally, we put a Netgear switch
> between the Cisco 2640 and the Soekris 5501 which cleared the problem. The
> 2640 is an older swtich, so the next option is try an upgrade to a 2660
> switch then see if we can connect the Soekris directly.
> 
> Anyone know of similar issues with the 5501?

i don't know of anything inherent in the ethernet port of the 5501, but
there was a time when the prevailing wisdom with older Cisco gear was
NOT to autonegotiate---even though the manuals might have stated
otherwise.

this beared out to be true with some older (some might say ``legacy'')
Sun gear, but x86 mobos with flavor-of-the-month chipsets might have
worked fine. IME, anyway.

what OS are you running on the 5501? dumb question, but did you also set
the 5501 to 100 FDX as well as the switch?

this really smells of an autonegotiate problem or duplex mismatch
problem. was/does the collision counter racking up numbers?