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If I connect a straight Ethernet cable where a crossover cable should be used. Can I get the behaviour that it works occassionally, once in a while? Too me it seems it would either work or not, not occassionaly -is this correct?

I have a situation where Ethernet sometimes work, and sometimes after reboot it stops working. The question is then -can crossover wiring be the culprit or not? One end is not auto MDI-X but the other probably is.

It would seem it would rather have something to do with speed negotiation or so but I don't know.

JohnyTex
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2 Answers2

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Normally it either works or doesn't, but your described behavior can happen if there is a short circuit between some wire(s) or the wires are not connected properly to its connector (inconsistent contact). I would try out another cable and see if this behavior can be reproduced again. If not, the problem was the cable.

marc
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If you have a modern machine or a NIC that was manufactured in the last 4-5 years or so, the type of cable, crossover or straight through, should not matter, as the NICs are now auto-sensing the TX or RX signal pins and operate accordingly.

As mmmint mentioned, it is either a broken cable or a dirty contact pin, causing this intermittent failure or your NIC is dying a slow death. The speed/duplex negotiation issues do not manifest themselves as you described. You only get a painfully slow exchange of data over that network segment. Of course this is true only if at least one side of this network connection is set to auto-negotiate speed/duplex settings. If both sides are fixed speed/duplex and they are mismatching, your setup should have never worked.

MelBurslan
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