[ixp1200] Connectivity questions

[Abhijeet Joglekar]

Magesh,

1) I think the evaluation board ports do the crossover function, so if you
   are connecting directly to a PC, then use a straight cable. I guess
   this is also consistent with your previous mail in which you said that
   when you used a straight cable, the led lights came up on both the IXP
   port and the pc network card.

I would advise you to forget the hub for now, just connect a straight
cable between your src and dst linux pc's and IXP ports and see if the
ipmm app works for you. Look at the rcv microcode source code and the
corresponding debug output on the console to see how far packet reception
works.

If you get that working, you can always figure out the exact hardware
setup (whether through switch/hub etc) later.

	-Abhijeet


On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Magesh Kannan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is a question for the guys at Princeton. Can you please briefly
> describe your hardware setup? I mean
>
> 1. what cable (cross-over/straight-thru) you use to connect the ethernet
> ports on the IXP1200 to the outside world.
> 2. if you always use a switch/hub between a host and the ixp1200 ethernet
> ports.
> 3. what ethernet card and driver do you use on the machines that you
> connect to the IXP1200 for the IPmm experiment.
> 4. if you force the speed on any of these ports to 10 Mbps etc.
>
> Contrary to some advice on this list for my question on cabling, it seems
> that the ethernet ports on the IXP1200 behave like ports on hubs. This
> means that straight-thru cables have to be used to connect an IXP1200 port
> to a PC's ethernet card. When I do this, the yellow LED on the IXP1200
> port blinks and the LED in the LED bank in the middle of the two quad
> connectors does not come on.
>
> If I force the speed on the linux PC's interface to 10 Mbps (using
> mii-diag), the link LED (in the LED bank) comes on, but when I try to send
> traffic, there is some debug output on the IXP1200's serial port
> (indicating packet reception) initially. After some time, there is no
> further output and I get carrier errors on the PC (found from ifconfig).
>
> The only configuration in which I have been able to make the IXP1200 ports
> receive packets is this
>
>  Linux PC's eth1 <--- STRAIGHT-THRU ----> 10 Mbps ONLY HUB
> 	<----- CROSS-OVER ----> 1XP1200 ETH port
>
> Consequently, I am confused.
>
> Thanks,
> Magesh
>