Multiple choice

An administrator is troubleshooting a PC on the network which is suffering from slow and intermittent connectivity. The PC has a ping success rate to the default gateway of less than half the ping attempts. Other PCs on the switch can consistently ping the default gateway. The switch port is configured for auto duplex and the PC is configured for full duplex. What will commonly cause this problem?

  1. The PC is set to full duplex. The switch port fails to autonegotiate the duplex setting and defaults to half duplex, which causes a duplex mismatch.

  2. The switch traffic is exceeding available frame buffers. The result is that frames are being dropped.

  3. The PC and the default gateway have different bandwidth Ethernet ports.

  4. The default gateway is not on the same switch that the PC is.
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A Correct answer
Explanation

Duplex mismatch occurs when one end is autonegotiating (switch) and defaults to half-duplex while the other end (PC) is hardcoded to full-duplex. This causes late collisions and packet loss on the full-duplex side, leading to slow and intermittent connectivity. The solution is to ensure both ends autonegotiate or both are manually configured to the same duplex setting.

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