Networking problems on HP DL380

[kimda]

I have a ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server with Debian Squeeze installed onto it.  What I am experiencing is intermittend networking failure (not accessible) or a lag when trying to log in remotely via ssh and at other times it is responding the way it should (fast and responsive). What I found online is that this particular firmware version has a bug causing these problems. On the site of vmware they had a fix specifically for vmware ofcourse. (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=203570 ) Is there anything I can do to fix this problem under Debian (I do not run vmware so the fix mentioned is pretty useless to me)? Or does someone have a fix how I can solve these issues? 

kernel: 3.2.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 (squeeze backports)
driver: 3.121 (squeeze backports - firmware-linux-nonfree - tg3)

ethtool -i eth0

driver: tg3
version: 3.121
firmware-version: 5719-v1.33 NCSI v1.0.60.0
bus-info: 0000:03:00.0

Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)

Thanks in advance.

Kim

[BrendonC]

I just upgraded our DL360p gen8 server's Broadcom firmware today. HP SUM doesn't automatically upgrade the NICs for some reason. The easiest way to do it is to download the latest HP SUM and make a bootable USB drive with it. Then, download the Broadcom firmware from the driver page for the DL380 Gen8, Redhat 6 OS (CP021537.scexe is the file I downloaded). Put this on the USB drive under hp/swpackages. Then boot the server to the USB drive and do an interactive install. Select the HP SUM icon and let it do the discovery process etc., and before you proceed with the upgrade, click the link in the page to check what components are selected (I can't remember the exact wording, but it's something like "show selected components" or something). If you don't see the NIC in there, then you'll have to run CP021537.scexe manually, which is what I did.

If you don't see the NIC in the selected components at this point, either proceed with upgrading anything else it found or cancel out of SUM. Get back to the main screen, then press ctrl+alt+d+b+x at the same time to open a Bash shell. CD into /media and you'll see the USB drive mounted there somewhere. CD to /media/[USB drive]/hp/swpackages and run "./CP021537.scexe" to update the Broadcom NICs. One component failed for some reason, but everything else succeeded:

driver: tg3
version: 3.121
firmware-version: 5719-v1.34 NCSI v1.2.19.0
bus-info: 0000:03:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no

I'm running Debian Wheezy 7.2, kernel package is linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 (3.2.51-1).

You can also boot into a RHEL / CentOS 6 live DVD / USB and run the update from there. I haven't found a way to do this while booted into Debian.

Hope this helps!