NC550SFP on Proliant DL380 G7 refuse to accept incoming frames/packets

[bschonec]

I have been trying for over a week now to get the be2net driver to work with an HP NC550SFP Dual Port 10GbE Server Adapter to no avail.

I have installed six different operating systems all with the same results.

I have the 10G card in the same VLAN as two other servers identically configured.  I cannot ping or otherwise 'talk to' the NIC on the servers.  If I attempt to ping the Cisco switch from any of the servers, the Ethernet address is indeed populated into the Cisco's MAC database.  The ping is not replied to as the HP server is "deaf" and doesn't respond to any layer two traffic destined for its own MAC address.  If I put the card in promiscuous mode, I can suddenly ping the server although I cannot ping server-to-server.  It's almost as though the NIC is ignoring all unicast traffic.  I _DO_ see multicast IP traffic (tcpdump -i eth4) from other servers.

I'm sure that layer 3 is working as I can ping servers w/ 1G NICs to other servers w/ 1G NICs in the same VLAN as the 10G NICs.  Jumbo frames are not enabled (yet).

I've tried Red Hat 5.3, 5.4, 6.0, Fedora 15 and Windows 2008.  The behavior is all the same.  The NICs are "deaf" unless put in promiscuous mode.

I find it hard to believe that the driver is at fault as it's been around for two years.  I've even tried different versions of the driver from open source sources and the HP web site. 

I put a 1G NIC in the same VLAN and the switch can ping the server at the 1G NIC's IP address so I do know that the switch is setup correctly.

[root@localhost network-scripts]# ethtool -i eth4

driver: be2netversion: 2.102.518r

firmware-version: 2.104.281.0

bus-info: 0000:08:00.0

Again, I have three servers all behaving exactly the same.  The switch ports are NOT trunked -- nor do they need to be -- so this isn't a VLAN issue from the Linux perspective.

Thanks, Brian

[bschonec]

It appears that the NC440SFP firmware version 2.104.281.0 breaks network connectivity.  Back-reving to 2.102.517.708 restores network connectivity but introduces a bug.