Broadcom bcm5700 NIC

[Chris Mitchell]

I am having problems on a Compaq Proliant GL380 G3 Dual Xeon 2.4GH with the Broadcom bcm5700 NIC driver (Embedded NC7781 Gigabit Server Adapter) running Red Hat Linux 7.3. I had the tg3 driver loading before I installed the HP Support Pack for Red Hat Linux 7.3 which installed the bcm5700 driver. Now it won't consistently come up on the network. Four out of five times or more it will hang when trying to display the default routes (route -e) and therefore won't come up on the network without a default route. I am running the 2.4.18-19.7.xsmp kernel (HP-initrd-2.4.18-19.7.xsmp.img). Restarting networking does nothing. I tried going back to the tg3 driver as well but it now does the same thing. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Jerome Henry]

Is your network started correctly ?
If so, try an ethereal on your NIC when trying to connect, and see what happens.
Are you on a fix IP or using DHCP ? Is your card coorectly mounted at start ?
J

[Chris Mitchell]

The network seems to be started correctly, I get no errors during the boot process.

I'm not sure what an ethereal is.

I am using a static IP with no firwall installed.

I talked to HP and they suggested recompiling the bcm5700 driver from source.

I saw the following thread in bugzilla and wondered if other HP people had any problems with the broadcom nic.

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=79997

Thanks,
Chris

[Bill Douglass]

Kernel 2.4.18-26.7.x has a fix for the Broadcom NIC:

Updated kernel packages for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 are now
available that fix a deadlock with the tg3 driver on certain revisions of
the Broadcom 570x gigabit ethernet series.


Try installing the latest kernel and booting from that. If it does not work, or you get other problems with the newer kernel, you can always back down to the previously installed kernel.

[Jerome Henry]

I think Bill got your answer !
ethereal is an utility based on tcpdump (man tcpdump if you want details), a graphical one, that shows packets captured on a NIC. It's a good way to see what is sent, and what comes back, so how the card works.
J

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

I had problems with tg3 too, but now bcm5700 works fine on
4 Proliants.

I use bcm5700-2.2.30-1 and 2.2.27 downloaded from HP site; NICs work in 100baseTx full duplex mode

Regards,
Vitaly