DL385 G5 bnx2 firmware not working

[Daniel Fussell]

I've got a DL385 G5 which I'm installing Debian Lenny from the latest install cd (5.0.2). I have the current firmware-bnx2 deb (firmware-bnx2_0.14+lenny1_all.deb) on a flashdrive, which it finds and loads, but the network card refuses to send a single frame! I've tried installing with PXE and a modified initrd.gz containing the firmware as well, with the same result. The NIC works find when loading the tftp boot images, but after the OS starts the NIC doesn't send or receive a thing.

Has anyone else gotten Debian Lenny or even Etch-and-a-Half to install and gotten the NICs to work? I'm pulling my hair out on this one.

Grazie

[Matt Palmer_2]

Hi,

have you checked that the G5 is at the latest HP patch level, 8.50 or whichever we are at now?

I've had issues like this before, and an update of the HP firmware CD resolved my problem with the bnx driver failing to work - although my issue was with SLES Linux as the OS

Hope that helps

regardss

Matt

[Daniel Fussell]

On second look, this is actually a DL385 G6. The ilo was reporting it as a G5p, but it's not. Anyone gotten the Broadcom 5709 bnx2 driver to work in Debian?

Thanks again

[Salvador Diaz]

Hello I hope you've already your problem solved, but anyway, we just bought two DL380 G6 and I just installed Lenny 5.03 for AMD64 on both of them. They've 8GB on RAM so I needed the 64bit dist. There were no problems at installing the card, just as you mention, the installer asks for the firmware so I inserted the flash drive, finds it and loads it correctly, configures it and even downloads updates. The only difference with your case up to this point is that I'm using this file: firmware-bnx2_0.14+lenny2_all.deb instead of the one you were using: firmware-bnx2_0.14+lenny1_all.deb. Perhaps that's the problem, I got this file from the hp website, linked from this install guide: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c00802520.pdf.


However I am having an annoying problem. I have not installed anything beyond the Debian base system except for the OpenSSH server, and the MySQL server, so I don't have any firewalls. The problem is that everytime I connect to the server via SSH or MySQL, the server takes about 10-15 secs to respond, after the connection is made it flies, but the problem is this 10 seconds delay, because an application cannot wait for 10 seconds for each connection to MySQL since it's likely that it connects a dozen or hundred times per second.

As informative facts:

* The server respond PINGS correctly, this means that there is no delay here.
* I can connect from this server to another one via SSH or MySQL with no delay. But if I connect from the other server to this one, the delay appears. Even using crossover cables and of course, no routers or switches or any other network interfaces up.

I hope it was usful for you and I'd highly appreaciate if you have anything that might help me. Thanx in advance.