I've installed Mandrake 8.2 and autodection of my hardware has everything up and running fine. However when I try to perform a backup of the Linux box across the network, tons of errors start showing up cisco switch port it's plugged into.

On our Windows and Netware servers, this is easily fixed by forcing speed to 100 and duplex to full both at the switch port and at the NIC of the server. This often has to be done to optimize client connections as well, so we just manually set everything to avoid problems.

In Linux however I don't see anything in netconf that allows me to put in the parameters for speed and duplex. Can someone please explain how I can do this?

what cards are you using? are you sure it's not starting in the correct mode? restart the interface and check the end of the dmesg output. You might want to try mii-diag to force a mode. have a search for it, but i'm not sure what cards it will work with

I've got a 3com 3c905 10/100 adapter.

In know the port on the cisco switch where I'm pulgged in is forced to 100/full. I don't know how to check or set this in Linux which is why I'm asking. Surely it's not any harder to set this than what it would be on a Netware or NT box is it?

I'm a newbie to linux, so the previous suggestion went right over my head. I've never heard of dmesg and the only way I currently know to restart the card is to restart the workstation.

Need input!

just run "service network restart" and then run "dmesg | tail" and check the last few lines, which will say what mode each NIC is running in. I'm fairly sure that the 3com cards do have a dos utility to edit the permanent settings on the card, have a search.

I'll look to see what I can find for a DOS utiliy.

So are you say "No you can't set the speed/duplex from the Linux OS as you can in other OS's"?

Yes, you can. You'll probably need the mii-diag tools, which can be found at scyld. Read the rest of the relevant info on the site for more information.

Heres what I had to do with my laptop to force it down to 10baseT-FD using mii-tool:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=14689

OK here's what I get:

The "service network restart" returns and invaild command message.

The "dmesg | tail" command returned a bunch of hex stuff that didn't mean anything to me.

I tried dmesh by itself and got a whole bunch of stuff, and one line kept repearing regularly:
eth0: Transmit error, Tx status register 82.
Probably a duplex mismatch. See Documentation/networking/vortex.txt
Flags; bus-master 1, dirty 986484(4) current 986485(5)

That would confirm to me I do have a duplex problem which is what we usually see on other platforms when NIC's are set to auto.

I've not yet found a DOS utility to set it permantly so I'm still looking for a solution.

You can pass options to the network module when loading it. You said you had a 3c905 so the following page should explain enough:

http://www.scyld.com/network/vortex.html

Read the 'Special Usage Instructions' section.

Well that's a lot of good info, too bad it's all over my head. I guess I'm bewildered because there's no text or GUI menu where I can just go select the speed and duplex I want. Why is this such a hard thing to do in Linux when it's so easy in other OS's?

I did finally get "service network restart" to work. You didn't mention I had to be logged into the console as root (su) and as a relative newbie I didn't think about it for some time.