With regard to using specific SPEED, DUPLEX, TRUNKING settings on a network, is it best to set to a specific (e.g.: 100M, Full Duplex)on both the switch AND the NIC? What other settings, with regard to Switch/NIC to achieve high performance. Note that ALL components on this network are 100 M and FULL DUPLEX. There are NO legacy 10 M or other. Switches are CISCO 2950's. Thanks

I'm not sure if the 2950's support Port Aggrigation (manageable switch) but if they do... Port Aggrigation rocks. Aggrigation uses up to 4 ports (on 3com switches) to communicate in parallel. That gives you redundant paths and and double, triples, or quadruples your bandwidth. I've found the best use is if your switches are are linked with CAT5 not Fibre you can increase your backbones bandwidth(you can use mixed media). Only problem is it eats up ports. But say on a two 16 port switches you have 2 ports on switch A and 2 ports on switch B set up as aggregate links you have 400mbs/Full-duplex data trasfer between them and redundat links if a port goes down. You still have 28 of your 32 ports left for whatever. There is a bit of management involed. Like port statistics...you have to add both ports together on both ends of the link to get your stats. If your network uses multicasts use multicast filtering to keep traffic forwarding only to those who it is intended. Auto-sensing/Auto-negotiation is only for mixed speeds 10/100/1000. If you do have mixed speeds Auto-sensing will keep the error rates down. If not lock'em down to 100mb. Traffic Prioritization is another tool that can give the end user the feel of speed. Really its just for critical applications on converged networks(voice,data,video). I've never messed with it. Its IEEE 802.1D/D17 standard if you want to look it up.