FTP failure - bad NIC driver?

[Ron Kinner]

I previously asked about an FTP problem where I had an NT box which FTP'd files to two HP 10.20 on the same hub and the session would fail to complete. I mentioned that a very large ping to the HP-20s would sometimes fail.

I don't know if it will solve our original problem but we have swapped the connection we were using on a separate NIC with the built-in one. And the large ping problem is not present on the built-in LAN! It seems to be confined to the card and is now present on the other IP address. We did this on both machines and in both cases it was the same.

Single packet pings always worked. It was only when packets had to be reassembled that the pings failed. Lanadmin never showed any errors and neither did netstat so I can only assume there is some bug in the driver for these cards.

Of course, the next question is what kind of cards do we have? Don't know. They came with the machines from HP and they are our production machines so no one wants to open them up just to look. (We can only do that sort of thing at 3AM when we are more or less off the air.) Is there a way to tell which card it is without opening up the box? Lanadmin say: btlan02 Hewlett-Packard LAN adapter Rev0

Is anyone aware of a known problem with separate NICs? Is there some patch they should have put in? Uname -a says: B.10.20 A 9000/871

Thanks

Ron

[Roger Baptiste]

Hi,

To find the type of cards,
run ioscan command as shown:

#>ioscan -nkfClan
Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
===================================================================
lan 0 0/0/0/0 btlan3 CLAIMED INTERFACE PCI Ethernet (10110019)
/dev/ether0
lan 1 0/5/0/0 btlan5 CLAIMED INTERFACE HP A5230A/B5509BA PCI 10/100Base-TX Addon
lan 2 1/8/0/0 gelan CLAIMED INTERFACE HP A4926A PCI 1000Base-SX Adapter
/dev/gelan2
***


You may be having a missing patch on the card with the problem. Do a
#swlist -l product |grep -i lan
to check the lan related patches you have. If you can post the card and patch info, maybe somebody here can help you with more info.

(you can also check on the back of the card to see for any modelnumber info)

HTH
raj

[Ron Kinner]

Thanks, here is the info from the two commands. I hope you can read it. Wish the window was bigger so I could see what it will look like.

Ron

ioscan -nkfClan
Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
===================================================================
lan 0 8/16/6 lan2 CLAIMED INTERFACE Built-in LAN
/dev/diag/lan0 /dev/ether0 /dev/lan0
lan 1 8/20/5/1 btlan0 CLAIMED INTERFACE EISA card INP0500
lan 2 8/20/5/2 btlan0 CLAIMED INTERFACE EISA card INP0500
% swlist -l product |grep -i lan
Networking B.10.20 HP-UX_10.0_Lanlink_Product
PHNE_10770 B.10.00.00.AA dhcpclient for 100BT lan
PHNE_18924 B.10.00.00.AA LAN products cumulative Patch

[Roger Baptiste · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You are using Interphase cards! I think we found the culprit.

Seems that this is a known issue :
From:

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=52a9d57318c7cc4fb8/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000050068121

EISA 100Mbit INP0500 NICs are vulnerable to RF interference. DocId: KBRCKBRC00002837 Updated: 6/23/00 12:58:14 AM

PROBLEM
Extremely poor peformnace on two servers in a data center with many other
unaffected systems. On these two D-class servers affeceted, they are the only
ones in the data center with EISA 100Mbit cards, all other machines have HSC
100Mbit cards going to the same switches and are fine. Syslog shows cable
disconenct messages, cards refusing to run at 100Mbit half-duplex and dropping
to 10Mbits with poor performance at that speed too.CONFIGURATION
D250 & D350 10.20 EISA INP0500 Interphase 100Mbit cards.RESOLUTION
Patching to latest level of the boxes and the switch were unsuccessful. Latest
firmware added to switch, still no joy. Check with RF meter showed substantial
RF interference around the systems. Customer givent he choice of trying
shielded cables or going to HSC cards - as he already had working HSC cards in
the environment he decided on these. No problems after changing to HSC cards

Hope that solves the mystery.
raj