HP Proliant DL360P random network failures

[Dennisray]

System configuration.

1. Ubuntu 20.04 operating system.

2 Xenon CPU, 2.9 GHz, 16 total cores, 256 Gb RAM, 1 terabyte RAID drives in all 8 slots

1. HP 331 FLR 4 port Ethernet 1,000BaseT card (other fiberI/O's removed.

Randomly, starting about 5 minutes after bootup, my HP sows "connection failed" Activation of Network failed.  

What happens is that I have two ethernet networks plugged in, one is from comcast, and one goes to a DHCP served subnet on a 24 port Netgear switch...

The Incoming Ethernet is fine.  The outgoing one, to the switch randomly gets that activation error and all my configuration data disappears when I look at the network address.  It comes back a few minutes later.

If I reapply the network plan with netplan apply, it comes back immediately but then randomly fails in the same manner subsequently.   

My network settings appear to be right and my DHCP server works just fine till the network failure, because the DHCP server loses connection to the network card (one of the four ethernet ports on the 331 FLR).

Any ideas?

[Dennisray]

I  think that I may have found the problem. 

On the second Ethernet port (it does not matter if it is on the 331 FLR card or plugin USB Ethernet dongles), we get a network activation error.   I am a superuser on the Ubuntu system and rarely use the Gnome based GUI.  

I had read on an Ubuntu message board that random failures sometimes happen and to check the GUI.

On the GUI on the network tab, it shows the Four 1,000BaseT Ethernet ports.   The prime port is attached to my Comcast network and I have no problems with it.  However, no matter which of the other three ports I use, I get the network error and on the GUI, the second ethernet port continues to say "connecting" with the pop up periodically stating that "Network Activiation has failed"...

This went away when I switched the settings from Automatic DHCP to manual entry.  The correct gateway and Ethernet address was already there, but for some reason (hint: bug) when the auto system goes out periodically, the network fail popup comes. 

I have verified via the command line that the command "ifconfig" continues to show the second ethernet port's configuration, when previously it would randomly disappear.

Interestingly what led me in this direction is that when the ifconfig would show the lost configuration on the second ethernet port, invoking "netplan apply" would bring the configuration back.  This implies that the bug is at the operating system level, not the DHCPD application that I am using to access the private subnet.

[Tam92]

Hello,

This seems to be caused from the OS end. 

From the hardware side you can keep the firmware up to date to isolate any hardware related issues.

Thanks,

TAM

[Dennisray]

@Tam92 

Yep

The system ROM and all other firmware is up to date.

I expect that this issue is Ubuntu related.

[Vinky_99]

@Dennisray 

I agree! It is possible that there is a bug in the Ubuntu operating system or the network card driver that is causing the automatic DHCP configuration to fail. Updating the operating system and the network card driver to the latest version may help resolve the issue.

Additionally, checking the system logs for any error messages related to the network card or DHCP configuration may provide more insights into the root cause of the issue.