A5509 NIC Problem

[Paul Murray_4]

Hello All,

I'm having trouble installing an A5509 100BT NIC in a J5000 running 10.20.

I've installed the driver package B5509BA_APZ (B.10.20.06) from the apps CD, installed the card and rebooted the machine. Although no /dev/lan1 device file has been created (and insf doesn't build one) - ioscan has now claimed the hardware, but shows :-

lan 1 10/2/2/0 btlan5 CLAIMED INTERFACE PCI(10110019) -- 2

I've also checked that this machine is fully patched, and that the kernel included the new drivers successfully. swconfig shows no problems after installing the driver package either.

Lanscan recognizes the interface :-

Hardware Station Crd Hardware Net-Interface NM MAC HP DLPI Mjr
Path Address In# State NameUnit State ID Type Support Num
10/2/2/0 0x001083FB58FF 1 UP lan1 UP 5 ETHER Yes 115


Other threads re similar problems state to install the drivers, but I've done that (a few times to be precise !!) but still no joy !!

Anyone have any ideas, coz this one's driving me crazy !!!!

Thanks in advance,
Paul.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

As long as you can be able to configure lan1, you don't need to worry about /dev/lan1 device file.

DLPI takes care of managing these interfaces internally unlike LLA with 9.x and before where the physical device files were needed to access the interface. You may find few interfaces appearing in /dev though as some of the old drivers still need to access these device files instead of DLPI.


-Sri

[Paul Murray_4]

Hi Sri,

Cool, one less thing to worry about !! Any idea as to why the ioscan output is showing the "PCI(10110019) -- 2" string - or is this also normal ?

Cheers,
Paul.

[rick jones]

Non-core card drivers from 10.20 on ceased supporting LLA and hence no /dev/lanN devicefiles. Instead they support DLPI and for link-level access one opens /dev/dlpi and issues an attach to the apropriate PPA (physical point of attatchment, iirc). Only an issue if you want to do link-level access. Regular TCP/IP networking works as always.

That ioscan is showing those numbers simply means that it does not have the magic decode to turn those into a vendor and product ID. Merely a cosmetic issue - perhaps there is an ioscan patch for that, or if you upgrade to later OS bits... :)

[Brian Hackley]

Paul,

The PCI(10110019) Vendor/model code is used to identify the type of card on 10.20 and older 11.0 versions. Since the 11.0 patch PHNE_22542, the 11.X software decodes this for you; for example:
lan 3 10/1/8/0 btlan5 CLAIMED INTERFACE HP A5230A/B5509BA PCI 10
/100Base-TX Addon

Are you having any operational issues with that card at the present time? If so, what kind of problems? What is in the lanadmin -g 1 output ?
Also, caution about 10.20...8 years old, and no longer supported. Even we at HP are still in the process of retiring or upgrading 10.20 boxes.

Hope that helps,
-> Brian Hackley

[Paul Murray_4]

Hi Brian / Rick,

Thanks for the info, it all now makes sense, and the card appears to be working ok !!

It scares me that this OS is no longer supported, but we need to keep this machine on 10.20 whilst we wait for a development team to recompile all the applications so that they run on 11.x and 64-bit. It's a case of keeping our fingers crossed that no major problems occur in the meantime !!

Thanks again !!

Regards,
Paul.

[rick jones]

Paul - it may not be "PC" for me to say this, but given that 11.0 first shipped almost 7 years ago and given that it was announced for at least a number of years that support for 10.20 was ending, it seems a little, well, late to be migrating from 10.20 at this date.

FWIW, you do not have to have applications migrated to 64-bit to migrate off of 10.20. 11.0 and 11.11 and 11.23 all support 32-bit applications. It is good that your developers are migrating to 64-bit, but you don't really have to wait to be 64-bit to get off of 10.20.

[Paul Murray_4]

Rick,

I couldn't agree more !! I only joined this company a year ago, and I was the one brought in to do the OS upgrades !!!!!

We've got 99% of our servers upgraded, but we have two 10.20 boxes running the legacy stuff whilst we wait for the developers to recompile (fix ??) the final bits of their code for 11. We tried running these last bits on 11 (to see if we could bypass the dev boyz), and the jobs fellover in a big way !

Thanks again for your help (and thoughts !!)

Regs,
Paul.