DL380 G5 - NIC Team Dropping - RPC Problems

[Keith W]

I have a DL380 G5 which I had moved my Exchange 2003 server onto at the weekend. Full rebuild - used latest SmartStart and Firmware CDs to prep them and then installed Windows 2003 SP2.

After server was up and running I noticed that the network comms kept failing. I was connected over RDP so not a complete failure but coudln't launch Outlook on a client (said Exchange was unavailable) and couldn't start a new RDP session (said RPC was down or something like that). Also couldn't connect to network drives - it said there were not enough resources.

Thinking I had screwed the build up I rebuilt it and still had the same problem.

After investigating, I noticed that in the HP Network Config Utility the 2 ports forming the team both had red X's on them. Rebooting made it all work again for a while.

Today I have red X on one connection and server is still operational.

Is this a NIC or a driver issue?

This server was used previously for Citrix and frequently dropped the Citrix sessions. We put this down to dodgy internet connection but looking back it could well have had this problem for some time.

Help would be much appreciated.

Server is under maintenance contract so hardware faults are not an issue.

This is not my production (one and only) Exchange server so I cannot afford for it to be up and down.

[Keith W]

See here for example image of what the NIC team look like at the moment:

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/3192/nicfu8.jpg

[Keith W]

And one more note (since I can't figure out how to edit the posts!).

I realise the red X indicated a disabled NIC but I am not disabling them. They are doing it themselves and coming back on when I reboot.

[Mark Matthews]

Hi Keith,

This sounds like it might be the whole horrible TOE / RSS issue with the NC373i NICs in the new G5 servers...

Read all about it here!

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=1153566