NIC Options

I recently had to change the speed, duplex and other parameters on an Ethernet card. It's easy to do this in redhat. I haven't yet had to do it on a BSD but it seems that I can pass an option to rc.conf (see Optimizing Your Configuration) and read the ifmedia man page. I was tweaking these settings to try to get a PowerEdge 1955 blade working with an older switch that doesn't support gigabit ethernet. Turns out that the chasis for these blades can't do that. It has to be plugged into a newer switch that supports gigabit ethernet. Dell told me that I could plug into a gig switch and then negotiate to 10 or 100, but that misses the point.