FreeBSD boots too fast on Dell PE850

[Mike Hunter]

On Aug 19 at 11:50, "Paul Koch" wrote:

> The second problem we found was, various NICs would report that they 
> were "active" after doing auto negotiation, but no rx packets were 
> being passed into to the OS.  Not sure if it was a hardware or driver 
> issue, but we discovered that by forcing a packet out the NIC via the 
> bpf interface, it would immediately start doing stuff.  It was if the 
> auto negotiation had not really completed fully until a packet was 
> transmitted.  This only occurred on certain types of NICs, the newer 
> ones.  This was a problem for us because we build something called 
> a "remote network appliance" (RNA) which is basically FreeBSD on a 
> floppy and runs a statistical lan analyser.  The RNA might have many 
> NICs in it, one with an IP, the others just connected to network 
> segments in promiscuous mode.  Our apps couldn't monitor any traffic 
> because no packets had be sent out the interfaces.  So, early in the 
> boot process we force out a couple of "Loopback" packets and everything 
> works just fine.
> 
> Not sure if the second issue would be a problem for normal installations 
> though.

I have a feeling this is related to windows; I recently watched a windows
server boot with ethereal and it did an "arp x.x.x.x is-at a:b:c:d:e:f"
(or 2 or 3) first thing (it had a static IP)...so of course a nic vendor
would never realize there's a problem since they only test with
windows....*sigh*.  Not sure how DHCP would play into that.