Subject: Repeater auto-negotiation

From: John Flick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 16:35:28 -0700 (PDT)

One item that we kind of blew off last time around was managment of
autonegotiation on MAUs attached to repeater ports.  We did this for
two reasons:

  - at the time, it didn't look like many people were considering
    implementing it
  - it simplified some things, especially the concern about how to
    figure out which repeater a port should use in a multi-repeater
    system

This last issue had to do with devices which have multiple repeater
segments, and the ability to dynamically assign ports to repeaters.
The problem was, if you have multiple 10 segments and multiple 100
segments, how do you figure out which segment to assign the port to
when its MAU is done negotiating.

I think things have changed in the following ways:

  - there are now multiple vendors shipping 10/100 repeater products
  - most (if not all) of the 10/100 repeater products I am aware of
    have a single 10 segment, and a single 100 segment (thus avoiding
    the can of worms in issue 2 above)
  - we decided to blow off a standard MIB for doing the actual port to 
    repeater assignment (we only report which repeater a port is
    currently on), since the mechanisms, as well as what is allowed,
    is very dependent on the design of the system, and very
    vendor-specific.  Therefore, the solution for how to do the
    mapping to potentially multiple repeater segments is a problem for 
    the vendor's private MIB.

I bring this up because:

  - I am in the middle of designing a private MIB for managing
    autonegotiation of repeater MAUs in a 10/100 repeater, which
    essentially turns into just a copy of the ifMauAutoNegTable with
    the group index added in.
  - I recently ran across another vendors product that solved this
    issue by creating ifTable entries for all of the repeater ports
    (something this WG as repeatedly rejected), then using the
    ifMauTable and ifMauAutoNegTable for the repeater MAUs.

The reality is that repeater MAUs DO autonegotiate, even if the
autonegotiation is simpler.  The IEEE std supports this
functionality.  Do we want to re-open this issue, given that 10/100
repeaters with autonegotiation are now showing up more and more
frequently in the market?

John