Remove on board network card drivers to be replace by a QuadPort card

[Daniel Comtois_1]

Hi everyone,
Can one of you, tell me how to remove securely the onboard network card, is it with SAM utility or by some config files (or combination of both) ?

Also, in the case the QuadPort card doesn't work properly after removing the onboard card, how to go back to the original configuration.

We've just install a PCI QuadPort Fast Ethernet that we want to use with symmetric trunking in adaptive mode. The card sellers company supply the drivers and software for the installation but it isn't remove the onboard card naturally. With those drivers and software, we don't have to use APA aggregation software from HP.

Thanks,

Daniel Comtois
Unix Technician
Viasystems Canada

[Dagmar Boelen]

Hi,

First of all backup your system!! Make a ignite-backup of you root-volume. After that install you new drivers and software. If this works fine you can install the new card. If the card has all the software it needs in the kernel it will show claimed when you type ioscan -fnc otherwise it will someting like unknown. In this case your card wont work.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Daniel,

As mentioned it is a good practice to create a make_tape_recovery whenever you make changes to the system.

On superdome family you can do some hardware maintenance online by using "rad" or SAM to do it. But the card should support the functionality.

If not, you can simply shutdown the box and remove the card and put the new card in. You do not have to remove any drivers. However, you will have to install drivers for the new Quadport card. A5506B is a 4 port card. On 11.0 system, you will need to install the drivers from Application CD1. Once it is done, you should see four extra lan devices in your "lanscan" and the card should be in claimed state in 'ioscan -fnC' lan output. You will have to change your /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file to change the interface.

To backout, simply put back the old card in the old spot and your box should be up and running except you changed the netconf file.

-Sri

[rick jones]

If you want to disable the built-in LAN port(s) you can remove the relevant driver, however, there can be, um, repercussions :)

For systems with the 10Mbit/s only onboard LAN interface, the driver was called "lan2" and the lan2 driver would drive HP-branded Intel 82596-based cards (including the old EISA add-on cards).

On HP-UX 11, system with the core 10/100BT interface used the btlan3 driver, which only ever drove a core 100BT lan. However, on 11i, all the Digital 2114X-based NICs on HP-UX had their drivers merged into the one "btlan" driver. If you remove that to disable the core interface, any HP add-on 10/100BT NICs would also cease to function.

You mention that the third party supplies drivers for the card to do trunking over the one card. So long as their driver will not also try to claim HP-badged NICs, you might get by with just removing the HP drivers (modulo that 11i issue). However, if their driver will claim any Digital 2114X-based NIC, then your only recourse would be to remove the cable from the core interface and do something to prevent someone from plugging another cable in.

On some older systems, it was possible to disable the core interface via firmware, but I'm not sure if that is the case for systems with PCI busses in them.

Also, if you trunk over a single four-port NIC, you still have single points of failure in the PCI-PCI bridge chip on the NIC and the I/O path to that PCI slot...

If all you want to do is move the IP address, you can either try to use SAM (it may or may not like the third-party stuff), or you can edit the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file by hand with say vi. Do be careful when/if you do that to continue to follow the syntax/semantics described in the comments in that file. Also, keep in mind that SAM sometimes put things at the bottom of that file, so look through the whole thing...

[Steven E. Protter]

You don't need to remove anything. As a matter of fact you should not remove the card. It will serve as a quickly configured backup in case the new one ever goes on holiday.

The built in lan card is very important. Its the only lan card you can use to boot off an Ignite Disaster Recovery server and rebuild your system.

You should become familiar with make_tape_reoovery and make_net_recovery

Under no circumstances should you attempt to remove the built in LAN card. Simply configure it to be down. On modern systems the built in lan card is part of the Core I/O subsystem and needs to be in there.

APA is not an issue here.

SEP