On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 08:59:11AM -0500, Jerry Van Baren wrote:
That is my reasoning behind my statement that we can generally ignore the autonegotiation <-> fixed configuration case because the odds of it working properly are poor anyway.
I'm not fond of giving up any ability to support a configuration just because some people get it wrong (including configurations where the human *can't* screw it up because the fixed end is some old hub or NIC that doesn't support anything other than 10Mbit, half-duplex), especially when the benefit of not supporting it is so low.
Having said all that, I don't have any problem with using 3.5 seconds as the safe timeout value. it isn't worth timing out too soon just to shave 0.5 or even 1.0 seconds off the negotiation timeout time.
OK, good. :-)
-Scott