Identifying NICs and settings on Windows and UNIX

[Taz]

Are there commands available in Windows and UNIX that will dump the following bits of information:

- NIC type
- NIC speed
- NIC duplex settings

The above information is required for all available NICs on a machine.

I think that this information may be available with the UNIX 'ifconfig' command but I don't know the Windows equivalent of it. Perhaps a WMI query would be able to get this information on Windows?

[gss03]

in windows: ipconfig /all

Shows all NICs info....doesn't show duplex stuff tho'

[TheAnimus]

duplex settings.... not going to get those easily.

Regretably the windows driver model dosen't abstract that out, so its a per driver setting.

you *might* find if you've just got a network of intel chips say, you can query the driver via devcon.

What do you need this info for? Audit? Surely jsut leave the box on auto duplex, and look at what the switch is saying?

[Taz]

^ The info is required as part of an inventory management solution for a client. I can get this info for various flavours of UNIX without too much trouble but Windows is porving to be tricky.

[peterb]

Can you get it from the properties menu in system, hardware?

As you have probably discovered, in linux systems

ethtool eth0

will tell you lots of info

ethtool(8) - Linux man page

There is also mii-tool

Manpage of MII-TOOL

[Jay]

The problem with windows is that duplex settings are per driver so you are going to be in a bit of bother trying to extract the info.

[directhex]

mii-tool is considered deprecated. apparently

and both ethtool and mii-tool require root privs to get any decent info

[Jay]

just a thought, you can get this info from your Managed switches.

[TheAnimus]

jarp, and you have only one place to look/configure.

[wasabe]

I had the same question and I did not have any luck finding the duplex answer using netstat. I did find a way to tell what duplex a NIC is connecting at when it's set to auto for some NIC's. We tested this on a few computers in our corporate network and it seems to rely on the NIC reporting its status to Windows. If you are lucky and have one that does this, then here's how you tell:

It's easiest to reboot first and create a fresh set of information events right at the top of the list. Then click on Start, right-click on My Computer, and select Manage. Expand the Event Viewer tree under System Tools and highlight System. In the information messages here, there could be a status update from your NIC telling Windows what it's connecting at. For example, my computer has a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller. In the Event Viewer, there are two information events logged at bootup from the source called 'b57w2k'. The top one, when double clicked, has a description of "Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller: Network controller configured for 100Mb full-duplex link." This event happens with this card everytime the computer is booted.

Its as easy as that, provided of course your card reports this information. We do have some NIC's on our network that do not. However, as of yet, I have not seen another way to find it because Windows allows the NIC's driver to run itself and it is not configured by Windows itself.

Hopefully this information will help someone and save you the amount of time I spent looking for an answer on the internet!

Also, our managed switches do not tell us whether the NIC has auto detected correctly or not, it just tells us what the switch is trying to run at. It's easy enough to just manually set it through the driver, but this was more of a curiosity question that was posed one day by someone in my department and I wanted to figure out an answer. It might be a little different than what the original poster was looking for, but we were curious if there was a way to tell in Windows, what duplex a NIC set to auto detect was actually connecting on.