On Tue, 28 May 1996, Guenther Grau wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Matt Thomas wrote:
> [...]
> > ifconfig de0 media 10baset
> > 
> > would be nice.  So would having flags for full-duplex and other things.
> > (disabling autonegotiation, etc.)
> [...]
> > One could expand ifconfig.  One could also put these thing under sysctl.
> > Both have advantages and I don't have much of preference.
> 
> I vote for the extension of ifconfig, as this is more intuitive for the
> users. I think this link1 link2 stuff should be deprecated and only be
> kept for compatibility. It makes more sense to give the options real names
> and make one program deal with all options that can be set, rather the
> remembering two or even more programs to handle part of the configuration
> stuff.

Most modern cards nowadays can autosense which media port is active, but
what you may also want to consider is SPEED. ifconfig is as good a place
as any to specify both speed and media port.

OSF (i.e. DEC Alpha) does the following in rc.config, for example
to also determine speed (for the DEC Tulip ethernet cards):

IFCONFIG_1="129.128.7.95 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 129.128.7.255 speed 10 up"

(speed can either be 10 or 100 for ethernet devices, 4 or 16 for TokenRing)

Although speed for Token is described in the manpage, it took a bit
of playing around to discover that 10 or 100 would also work :-). The
card defaults to 100 if not specified...

2 more cents.
--
James S. MacKinnon           Office: P-139 Avahd-Bhatia Physics Lab
Team Physics                 Voice : (403) 492-8226
University of Alberta        email : Jim.MacKinnon@Phys.UAlberta.CA
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