The BladeCenter Saga.

Will Froning wfroning at angui.sh
Fri Jan 13 16:34:40 PST 2006


On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Andre Guibert de Bruet wrote:
=>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.

I can agree to bge cards working on standard Dell 1U/2U/xU boxes, but 
they did not work in the first generation Dell blades I tested.  So 
there is definitely some difference even when the chips are reported 
to be the same.

Thanks,
Will

-- 
Will Froning
Unix Sys. Admin.
wfroning at angui.sh


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