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Quadra 605 - funky ethernet card
- Thread starter wood_e
- Start date
Check for jumpers on the card. Sometimes it is placed there to select right media type if you have two or more of them. I had similar situation with my Farallon Nubus PN 590 - its LED kept flshing until I moved jumper to "TP" position. But of course it is possible that that can be set via your card's software too.
I had one of these, and I found out that it's, well, kind of impatient with respect to TP/AUI autodetect. Here's what's going on:
- Pretty much all modern Ethernet gear is auto-negotiate, based on the old National Semiconductor NWAY spec. What this means is that there is no carrier on the line at first. The switch takes about a second to tell if there's a link partner, then falls back to 10 Mbit half-duplex if it doesn't get an answer.
- However, the gate array on the Asante cards doesn't want to wait that long; it's from a day when 10BASET hubs and AUI were all there was. So it gives up and switches back to AUI before the switch has a chance to fall back, causing the switch to give up because the port is now disconnected.
I'm not sure if Asante's drivers can force one port or the other, because I've never had to use them.
The Ethernet chip itself can be forced to TP mode, but it takes some soldering skill -- the one jumper on this card is for link detect, which won't help here. An easier solution would be to use a 10BASET hub as a go-between, or (if your switch will let you; most cheap ones won't) lock the port down to 10 Mbit half-duplex.
-lee
- Pretty much all modern Ethernet gear is auto-negotiate, based on the old National Semiconductor NWAY spec. What this means is that there is no carrier on the line at first. The switch takes about a second to tell if there's a link partner, then falls back to 10 Mbit half-duplex if it doesn't get an answer.
- However, the gate array on the Asante cards doesn't want to wait that long; it's from a day when 10BASET hubs and AUI were all there was. So it gives up and switches back to AUI before the switch has a chance to fall back, causing the switch to give up because the port is now disconnected.
I'm not sure if Asante's drivers can force one port or the other, because I've never had to use them.
The Ethernet chip itself can be forced to TP mode, but it takes some soldering skill -- the one jumper on this card is for link detect, which won't help here. An easier solution would be to use a 10BASET hub as a go-between, or (if your switch will let you; most cheap ones won't) lock the port down to 10 Mbit half-duplex.
-lee
