DL160 G6 BIOS Efficiency setting causing NIC to go to sleep

[Heather Keen]

I have some HP DL160 G6s (Xeon E55xx) running Centos 5.5 and I've noticed that if the BIOS power efficiency mode to is set to "Efficiency" then after a couple of days the NIC card will seem to go to sleep/hang in some way - inbound connections seem to be ignored/dropped, but outbound traffic from the server continues.

I've had to set the BIOS power efficiency mode to "Performance" in order to overcome this problem. Although we bought these servers specifically for their power efficiency so by changing this setting I've probably forced them not to try to be efficient at all :(

We have 6 servers of this type (bought at different times) and they have all exhibited the same problem.

Has anyone had anything happen like this? Or know any other way to prevent this happening without having the change the BIOS settting?

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hey!

Have you looked into the drivers? Maybe a downgrade/upgrade can improve this?

As far as I can see there were new linux drivers out on the 15th of December last year.

As far as the quickspec goes - the builtin nic is a NC362i - are you using that one or do you have an extra NIC installed?

[Heather Keen]

Using the builtin NIC yes.

Hmm, that latest set of drivers from 15 Dec doesn't say much in the release notes other than support for RH6 (and the Intel site says even less). Might be worth a try though. Alas, all my servers are running live services now so I can't tinker with them at the moment, but I will make a note to try it at the next available point.

Cheers.