Installed new HP ethernet PCI card on HP Workstation c3650 and it is not recognized

[KBarnes]

I installed a new HP ethernet PCI card on my HP workstation when the one on the motherboard no longer worked.. Reading the instructions on HP website, lanscan does not pick up the new PCI card; ioscan sees it but it is unclaimed. I tried to install the Iether00 driver from CDROM disks, but cannot find it. /stand/vmunix says it has been installed, but I don't know how to proceed - can't find the driver and can't get the new card recognized.  nwmgr requires PPA number and I don't have that.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

What model card did you install? It presumably has a part number/SKU on it somehwere? How did you know it was a supported card for HP-UX? Or are you just assuming that any HP card will work in this system? (hint: they won't)

What OS version is the C3650 running? 11.11?

[KBarnes]

Hi,

   Thanks for responding. the OS is HP-UX 11.11v2 I believe. We looked
at applying v3 patches, but I don't think we did. The PCI card I
installed was: HP PCI ETHERNET CARD 5184-4725
, which I got on eBay. I tried
others but none would work. This appears to work from the back as DSR is
illuminated and Send/Receive activates on the network. ioscan -fn shows
it to be UNCLAIMED, so I thought it must be the driver that is needed.
Iether00 is already installed, but doesn't appear to be the one it
needs, or at least it doesn't recognize this PCI card.

Regards,

Kevin

--

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

I don't recognise that as a card that was ever used on HP-UX systems. If the driver is installed it would automatically pick up the card so unless there are any other networking drivers you haven't installed, then you probably have an unsupported card. Even if the chipset was supported, if the card is reporting the wrong PCI ID up to the OS, then you won't be able to get HP-UX to recognise it and I'm not aware of any way around this.

If you're up for doing a trawl of eBay and the like to try and find a supported card, I would expect one of the following PCI NICs to work (I say expect - I am looking at PCI cards that were supported in the equivalent SERVER models to the C3650, rather than WORKSTATION models - that information is who-knows-where now, as workstations were very much something that stayed with HP and was never moved to HPE - plus everything is way-way-way out of support now as well):

A4929A PCI 1000BaseT GbE card - uses the GigEther-00 driver

A5230A PCI 100BaseT card

A5506A PCI 4-port 100BaseT card

A3738A PCI 10/100BaseT card

I think all those 100BaseT cards just use the btlan driver, which is part of the core kernel and should be already installed.

[KBarnes]

Hi Duncan,

   Thanks for your help; we are a middleware vendor and have to keep HP-UX supported as long as our clients still have it. We move all our HP 9000 server code off to this workstation and it has been a very reliable system until the ethernet card went out. Thanks again.

Best Regards,

Kevin

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Kevin, you can pick up a 2nd hand C3700 workstation on eBay for <$1000 - most of the components in your C3650 are probably interchangeable with it as well. Might be more straightforward than trying to locate a working card?

[Patrick Wallek]

From what I have just found, it appears that the NIC you mention is only supported on the HP Pavilion line of PCs and a select few other things.  The C3650 workstation is not mentioned.

The parts listing I was able to find for the C3650 (A7814A and A7817A) did not list any network cards.

[KBarnes]

Hi Duncan,

   Yes, if this doesn't work out with the PCI card, that is next on my list of solutions. Really thought this would be simpler. HP-UX is so good at recognizing SCSI devices from many manufacturers that I thought this would work. Oh well - thanks so much for your help!

Best Regards,

Kevin

[Duncan Edmonstone]

That was my observation too Patrick - the list of cards I provided above was for HP9000/S800 Servers from a similar pedigree as the C3650 (they would for example have worked in a L-Class or N-Class server). They also had PCI buses and those cards would certainly have OS drivers so the kernel should recognise them. In theory they should work in a workstation, but who knows if they were actually supported (largely irrelevant now given the PA-RISC workstatsions are so far out of support anyway)

Kevin btw I assume where you state the OS version running on this C3650 as "HP-UX 11.11v2" running "uname -r" on the system just comes back as follows:

# uname -r
B.11.11

which is actually HP-UX 11iv1

You really shouldn't be running HP-UX 11iv2 (11.23) or 11iv3 (11.31) on a workstation as they were mever qualified with those versions of the OS. They have been known to work, but the results you get may be "inconsistent"!

[KBarnes]

I replied to this earlier, but it didn't get posted. I believe our system is HP-UX 11.23 v2.

Regards,

Kevin