dl380 g5 intermittent network connectivity issues (debian lenny 5.0)

[Matthew Lenz]

Got some serious issues with a brand new dl380 g5 running debian lenny.

The machine seems to have issues with intermittent network connectivity. It'll work for awhile and then stop working. The real bugger is that I'm having diagnose this remotely.

Initially we thought it was a bad NC360T add-on card (intel e1000e driver based card, which debian had setup as eth0 and 1). I switched the interfaces to use the internal ethernet (eth 2 and 3) which I believe is a bnx2 based chipset.

It worked and I thought that fixed the issue until about 9 hours later it started doing the exact same thing (no connectivity, or it'll start a connection and then the connection will lock up).

I've got these people going over all the network/firewall/switch/routers to make 100% sure its not a networking issue, but I'm pretty sure its something with the actual server itself.

I've also got an admin running hp's diagnostic cd against the machine.

Has anyone else seen anything like this? Maybe an IRQ sharing issue (only guessing cuz I was reading other posts talking about issues with HPs and shared IRQs here on these forums).