DL380 G4 network connection problem

[Rony Adriyanto]

Hi,

I have Proliant DL 380 G4 with Broadcom NIC, with OS Windows 2003 Server SP2 on it, and the latest support pack installed. We have unsolved problem for more than a year which is sometimes network connection suddenly dropped with no error logs on event viewer. It was begun when I applied SP2 on it. I have read about TCP offload issue on W 2003 SP2, and already implement the workaround from MS sites by turning off RSS and TCP Chimney, but still the problem persisted. Once the problem corrected when I install the latest support pack, but now when there is critical patch issued by Microsoft, and I installed the patch, the problem re appeared. Is anyone has same problem with me and managed to solve this?

[Ravindra Muniraj]

We had relatively the same issue ( DL385 G2 servers ). Below are the steps that we followed to solve it:

Issue: HP Proliant DL385 G2 servers intermittently goes out off the network and hangs
at applying personal settings.

Reasons:

1: NIC card & teaming driver.

2: The TCP/IP Offload-enabled network adapter may consume lots of nonpaged pool memory. This may cause other problems in the operating system.

3: In some cases, the TCP/IP Offload-enabled network adapter may request large blocks of contiguous memory. This makes the computer stop responding when it tries to free the memory.

Workarounds:

1) Uninstall the NIC cards from device manager and re-install it again.
2) Update the NIC card driver, NCU, Teaming driver and ILO.
3) Dis-solve teaming and reteam the NIC.
4) If nothing works, enable the server with single NIC.


Solution: Try the solution one by one. If solution 1 fixes the issue, do not try the other solutions.

Solution 1: Upgrade the tcpip and netbt drivers for Windows 2003 SP2 to their latest revision available in the following rollup package:

A Scalable Networking Pack (SNP) hotfix rollup package is available for Windows Server 2003 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950224/en-us


Solution 2: Disable the TCP Chimney offload feature from the following link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942861/en-us

Along with this get network card driver and firmware updated to latest as mentioned in following HP site:-
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3288112 &prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=3219233&swLang=8&ta skId=135&swEnvOID=1005#12212

Solution 3:
After you install Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack (SNP) on a computer that has a TCP/IP Offload-enabled network adapter, you may experience many network-related problems.
The following issues may occur when Windows Server 2003 SNP is turned on:
a.You experience intermittent RPC communications failures.
b. The server stops responding.
c. The server runs low on nonpaged pool memory
This update turns off default SNP features.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496/

[Rony Adriyanto]

Thanks for your clues, I've already try your instructions on my server, but the result is still the same. Is there any other solutions that I can follow?