rp7420 MP lan issues

[Charles McCary]

Has anyone heard of problems with the lan settings on MP lan cards. I think our MP lan cards are causing problems on the subnet on which they're located. I currently have a "known" bad card (I've scheduled a replacement), but I'm wondering if anyone else out there has heard of these types of problems?

[Mohanasundaram_1]

Hi Charles,

What type of problems are you exactly referring to?

The speed you set are getting reset? Have you got the latest firmware on the system?

get the output of

cm> sysrev

Explain more on the nature of the problem.

With regards,
Mohan.

[Charles McCary]

Yes - that's one issue (the speeds were set at 10M and it's being reset to autonegotiate), however the big issue is that a couple of times the other lan instances on this box has been unreachable. I'm not sure if we're having lan issues or if the MP lan card is causing problems on the subnet or internally within the box itself. We've ended up rebooting the servers to get them back to where we can reach them through there normal lan interfaces.

We do need to upgrade the firmware on the MP as well (that's scheduled as well).

However, I'm trying to figure out if these cards are causing additional problems other than the speed issue...

[Mohanasundaram_1]

Hi Charles,

I have faced problems in the rx7620 and rx8620 for MP but not on rp7420.

But there is a general recommendation that the MP(management LAN) be put in a seperate subnet from the production LAN. It may cause some hanging issues if in the same subnet, in very rare cases.

But I would spend my energy to confirm about the switch settings and cable problems before jumping to conclude that there is a MP issue.

What you can do is,

1) Disconnect the MP LAN and observe if the problem comes on the production LAN.

2) check the /var/adm/nettl.LOG* files through netfmt for any specific problem (let me know if you need more info on how to do it)

3) Check if you have got any duplicate IP issue. nettl.LOG* may again indicate this.

4) When your LAN becomes inaccesible, are you able to use a console over the serial cable and access the OS?

5) Check the system event logs at MP to confirm if there are any problems reported there.

6) Confirm your OS has the quality pack patch bundles and they are up-to-date.

7) Any errors of MP should be logged in system eventlog and Forward progress log.

Hope this helps.

With regards,
Mohan.

[Charles McCary]

"But there is a general recommendation that the MP(management LAN) be put in a seperate subnet from the production LAN. It may cause some hanging issues if in the same subnet, in very rare cases."


Can you tell me more about where this recommendation is made and what the rare cases might be?

[Mohanasundaram_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Charles,

This recommendation was made when we had problem in rx7620/rx8620 systems hanging. The HP engineers working on this insisted that the MP LAN be set at 10Mbps, connect the MP LANs in a different subnet from the production LAN.

If the MP LAN is on the same subnet, in some rare situation where the MP failover does not succeed, it may cause issues to all systems in that subnet.

We had to power cycle these systems when he had this problem. We did not get any access to the serial console as well.

So, do you have,
1) 2 MP cards on the system? if so, are both of them connected to the LAN?
2)access to the OS from the console when the problem occurs?

With regards,
Mohan.

[Hank Eggers]

We just got our rp7420 installed a few weeks ago and the lan card had to be set to 10/auto for it to work

[Charles McCary]

OK - thanks for the info. We were told that it had to be set to 10M as well when we were setting these up. And we did set them to 10M. However for some reason a couple of things have occured. 1) the dual-card is hung (both think they're masters) 2) The lan setting keeps getting set to auto by the mp itself.

HP says firmware upgrade will help this and I'm scheduling this, but for the time being I've disconnected the MP's from the lan.

I'll use a laptop if I need console connectivity before the firmware upgrade. Thanks for your help