Lan

[[AK]Hylander]

Hey all,

I have a small LAN here at my house. I have a ZyXel Prestige 643 xDSL modem/switch/4-port hub hooked up to 1.5/384 DSL. I've used DHCP for about 2 1/2 years now and decided to assign static IPs for a few reasons that aren't all that important right now.

No problems with Windows boxes, but I have a small issue with my Apple iBook SE (Squidly ). I got it to work with the Apple Airport no problem. I can browse the net, email, etc and no issues. However, I noticed that my 10/100M light for that port is now not lighting up since I switched from DHCP to static IP. You have any idea why that light would no longer light up? I know it sounds trivial... but I like to know these things and the causes. No needs for a lecture on MACs, etc

[[AK]Squidly]

No idea... Congrats!

[The Wraith]

It means you're connected at 10mbps. The fact it was lit in the past probably only ment your device(s) were receiving ungodly amounts of late collisions, if it wasn't just a misreporting of potential mismatched configurations, i.e. 10/Full or 100/Half. Ultimately, you can't actually do 100/full in a hub. Odds are, your device was probably always sustaining a 100/Half connection, or trying to. It was likely sending data down one pair of copper that had no active bridge grouping, thus, causing lots of errors. Doesn't mean you weren't connected at some 100-odd setting, just means you weren't actually communicating as such. Your hub doesn't receive data on both pairs, being 1,2 / 3,6, as a switch would.

[Slaughter]

Wouldn't it just be a different color if it were 10?.. I know my hub is like that..

[The Wraith]

I cannot speak intelligently about the available color options of your product.

[Glanzer]

Hey there Hylander,

So your Apple is working fine, but the port on the hub it's connected to isn't lighted? That could mean either it's working at 10Mb instead of 100MB (as suggested by Wraith above), or it's working at HD (half duplex) instead of FD. Or maybe something else I don't know. That about covers all situations I think.

I have a 10/100Mb switch (not hub), and the lights are green when the client NIC is set for 100Mb but yellow when it's set for 10Mb.

Instead of configuring your PCs to auto-negotiate their speed, I suggest "hard coding" them at 100Mb. We have found a dramatic increase in throughput here at work when we do that with our servers. There's something about that auto-negotiate that seems to slow things up even when they're supposedly running at 100Mb. Your mileage may vary.