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Steelhead Appliance Installation and Configuration Guide
Troubleshooting
Duplex Mismatch
Steelhead appliance to switch: straight-through cable
Steelhead appliance to Steelhead appliance: crossover cable
Steelhead appliance to a host: crossover cable
Duplex Mismatch
The following symptoms occur due to a duplex mismatch:
Access is not faster after configuring the Steelhead appliance.
The interface counters display error messages. An alarm or log message about error counts appears.
The pass through rule is ineffective. (This is a definite indication of duplex mismatch.)
There are many retransmissions in packet traces.
You cannot connect to an attached device.
You can connect with a device when you choose auto-negotiation, but you cannot connect with the
same device when you manually set the speed or duplex.
Good performance for one direction of data flow, but poor performance in the opposite direction.
Possible Cause
You have probably set the duplex value for your router to 100Full (fixed) and for the Steelhead
appliance to Auto.
Example
The following example shows applications that appear slower with Steelhead appliances configured in an
in-path deployment. The timed performance numbers to transfer a 20 MB file over FTP are:
no Steelhead appliance – 3:16
cold Steelhead appliance – 5:08
warm Steelhead appliance – 3:46
Adding a pass through rule for an application does not help. Slow connections appear as optimized in the
Management Console on the Current Connections report page. However, stopping the Steelhead appliance
service while leaving the system powered on and an in-path configuration returns performance to original
levels.