The BladeCenter Saga.

[Andre Guibert de Bruet]

On Jan 5, 2006, at 4:17 AM, Andrea Brancatelli wrote:

> The blades have two Broadcom NICs... the bge drivers fires up with no
> problem, but none of the bge0/bge1 card seems to actually work.  
> Whathever
> setting I apply to them I cannot reach anything on the outside, and
> furthermore the emergency shell on VTY4 allows me a very short set of
> commands. I have no doubts on the functionality of the hardware for
> various reason (we tried to install on 3 different server always  
> with the
> same results; one of the blades was working ok with windows 2003  
> before).
>
> A very suspicious thing is that ifconfig reports for both the cards:
> "status: no carrier", while the cable is surely pulled in (it's hard
> wired, it cannot be pulled off at all).
>
> So we are stuck again. I downloaded the complete ISO for amd64. I  
> plan on
> doing the installation from CDRom on Blade 3 (the one that actually
> succeeds in seeing the CD) and then investigate further on the  
> Broadcom
> issue.
>
> Do anyone has ever stepped on problem with the bge driver?

Though not in a blade configuration, I have had a couple of Dell  
PowerEdge servers with the bge driver running for a couple of years  
flawlessly.

pciconf thinks the following, on both systems:

bge0 at pci1:8:0:  class=0x020000 card=0x00d11028 chip=0x164414e4  
rev=0x12 hdr=0x00
     vendor   = 'Broadcom Corporation'
     device   = 'BCM5700 NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
     class    = network
     subclass = ethernet

dmesg:

bge0: <Broadcom BCM5700 Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x7102> mem  
0xfeb00000-0xfeb0ffff irq 17 at device 8.0 on pci1
miibus0: <MII bus> on bge0
brgphy0: <BCM5401 10/100/1000baseTX PHY> on miibus0
brgphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseTX,  
1000baseTX-FDX, auto
bge0: Ethernet address: 00:06:5b:3a:xx:xx

ifconfig:

bge0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
         options=1a<TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
         inet 10.10.10.110 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.10.10.255
         ether 00:06:5b:3a:xx:xx
         media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
         status: active

> Hints?

Does your blade management console allow you to enable/disable the  
ethernet cards presented to the system (By returning no carrier status)?

Andy

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