How to Change Ethernet Media Speed for AIX

How to Change Ethernet Media Speed for AIX

First you need to find out the device name of your Ethernet card. It should be ent0 if the machine has only 1 Ethernet card. Otherwise, it may be a higher number.

You can determine the legal values for the media speed of the card by running the following command (where the value of ent0 may be different if you machine has multiple Ethernet cards).

lsattr -R -l ent0 -a media_speed

If this command results in the following error—

lsattr: 0514-528 The "media_speed" attribute does not exist in the predefined 
 device configuration database.

—then the Ethernet card is a 10Mbps card that will only do 10Mbps/half duplex

If you do have a 100Mbps card, the lsattr command will return something like this:

 10_Half_Duplex
 10_Full_Duplex
 100_Half_Duplex
 100_Full_Duplex
 Auto_Negotiation
 

These are the media speeds the card will understand. To see the cards current media speed setting you can run

lsattr -EH -l ent0 -a media_speed

To change the media speed, run:

chdev -P -l ent0 -a media_speed=100_Half_Duplex

The value for media_speed can be any of the values listed by the lsattr -R command above. The change does not take effect until you reboot the machine.

If you select a value other than Auto_Negotiation the switch port the machine is connected to must have the same configuration. If the switch and the machine do not match you may get no network connectivity or poor performance.