Setting Ethernet port modes

[Jeffrey Pyne]

On Friday, January 24, 2003 12:25 PM, Simper, Brian D wrote:

> I will be assembling machines with multiple network cards but 
> I will need to be able to individually customize the mode of 
> each Ethernet port.  For example, one machine might have 
> three Ethernet cards but eth0 is 100/full, eth1 is 100/half, 
> and eth2 might be auto sense.
> 
> Can the kernel be tweaked to allow loading multiple copies of 
> the same driver each pointed at a different port?  Can each 
> port be set manually to a different setting?

What if you created a startup script that used mii-tool to force the
speed/duplex of each interface?  E.g.:

/sbin/mii-tool -F 100baseTx-FD eth0		# 100 Mbps/full duplex
/sbin/mii-tool -F 100baseTx-HD eth1		# 100 Mbps/half duplex
/sbin/mii-tool -F 10baseT-FD   eth2		# 10 Mbps/full duplex
/sbin/mii-tool -F 10baseT-HD   eth3		# 10 Mbps/half duplex

I haven't tested this because I don't have a machine with multiple NICs of
the same type in front of me, but it seems like it should work.

> Is there some hidden config file that does this of which I am not aware?  

Probably.  I thought maybe ifcfg-eth0, but I don't see anything about link
speed or duplex setting in there.

~Jeff