Currently debating a couple best practice questions with a co-worker and I would appreciate some input from the community.
First topic, locking down port speed on a switch for ALL active ports and eliminating the use of Auto Neg. The coworker is arguing that the use of Auto-Neg is known to cause a performance hit across all networking devices and can cause other potential issues. My stance is that yes, locking down switch port speeds for Servers and Networking devices is one thing as they should be documented on those ports and typically dont get moved around often, but things like workstations and printers are unnecessary and locking their port speeds down on the switch(es) introduces too much administrative overhead to be worth it.
Second topic revolves around statically set IPs vs DHCP. My preferred solution has always been to correctly configure DHCP(with a secondary DHCP server for redundancy if possible) and create reservations for the devices. I was always under the impression that using Static IPs for all devices across the network would just add more administrative work, especially for clients who have a lot of users coming into and out of the office with laptops etc. His argument is that its worth the potential management nightmare for the extra safety and reliability and that the DHCP stack has many exploitable security vulnerabilities depending on the platform hosting it. In my eyes there are vulnerabilities in almost everything but there are many more effective methods for risk aversion that don't make the network harder to manage(patching, firmware updates, correct configuration etc)
If i'm wrong Id love the opportunity to learn more so I appreciate the input fellow spice heads! :)