I just purchased a 24-port unmanaged NWay switch to replace our ancient 10BaseT four hub arrangement. In lab testing, I can set our test NW6 server (running IP only) to 10BaseT half-duplex (fixed, not auto-negotiating) and communicate just fine with a workstation (also fixed at 10BaseT half-duplex). However, I have had no luck getting the systems to "talk" to each other using 100BaseT in either half or full duplex, nor with 10BaseT full-duplex. (Both the server card and workstation card are configured manually to the same speed and duplexing standard in all tests...)

I'm only running 5'jumpers of Cat5 cable between the server-switch-workstation, and I've exchanged with other short Cat5 cables (in case one is bad or has an open pair).

I've got a FastNIC 10/100 PCI card in the Novell server, and a Linksys PCMCIA 10/100 card in the workstation (my laptop). (NW6 did not include a driver in the OS for the FastNic, so I used the FastNIC floppy driver included with the card. Perhaps I need to check for an updated driver?)

Any other ideas? (I'm new to switches - I'm hoping to speed up our network simply, and eventually will have two NIC's in the server - one for 10BaseT (old Cat3 wiring) and one for 100BaseT (new Cat5) so our manufacturing department can access our MRP system at 100 Mbs, while our standard users (on old wiring) can still do their thing...

TIA,
Robert
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RFNelson

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