NIC for ML370 G6 that works with Debian "Lenny"

[thedirman]

I have an ML370 G6 with the Quad Port Network Card and could not get the Net Install to recognise the card. I had a D-link that was not being used so I used that and now it is begining to fail.

I would like to identify an HP NIC with 1 or 2 ports that will work with Debian "Lenny". Can anyone running such a config send me the HP part #?

Thanks in advance.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Any Intel GB NIC that fits the server will work.

The server has built in NIC card does it not? They don't work?

SEP

[thedirman]

Steven,

No This Server did not come with an on board NIC. It is a ML370 G6 that came with a Quad Port NIC which did not work at all.

I got it up and running with the D-Link card I had but that is failing and I would prefer to replace it with an HP NIC so that I can keep the server under warranty.

Thanks in advance.

[rick jones]

I'll take a guess that the reason the onboard quad-port NIC (based on a Qlogic/Netxen 3031 chip IIRC) is that the Debian Lenny install media did not have the "non-free" firmware present. That has tripped me up on numerous occasions with other ProLiants (in those cases, non-free Broadcom NIC firmware...) One can either install Ubuntu or some other distro, which does not take the same point of view about the non-free firmware on the installation media, or one can run a magic script which will insert the non-free firmware into the Debian install ISO:

http://people.debian.org/~dannf/add-firmware-to/add-firmware-to

In theory, if you have a mostly working NIC in there, you could apt-get install the non-free firmware and be able to enable your core NICs without a re-install. Just to re-iterate - I am making an assumption about the problem you are encountering with the ML370 G6. If the issue is a missing driver in addition to missing non-free firmware then you would need the driver too...

[Daniel Frazier]

The comment about non-free firmware is inaccurate - netxen_nic does not require firmware to be loaded at runtime (fw is onboard).

It is more likely that the netxen_nic driver in Debian 5.0 is just too old to support your card.

You can try installing a 2.6.32 kernel from backports.org. This kernel is a backport of the kernel targeted for Debian 6.0 'squeeze'. If you do, and this doesn't detect your NIC, please provide the output of dmesg so we can take a look

On the other hand, if you are tied to the 2.6.26 kernel in lenny, you might have better luck with a NIC based on the Intel 82575EB chip. Support for these cards was added in one of the 5.0.x releases. Apologies that I don't have a part number list for these cards.