On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Jarrod B Johnson <jbjoh...@us.ibm.com>wrote:
> Don't know much about Dell specifically, however I'll offer some > guidance. > Very much appreciate your helping out! I haven't any > If the Broadcom part has the tg3 driver, you may be out of luck depending > on the failure state. For example, BCM5704 chips fundamentally cannot > provide BMC access while executing PXE. On the other hand, bnx2 managed > chips tend to fare better, there generally is at least one way to make it > work correctly, though drivers and nic firmware matter *greatly* still. Not > as resilient as I would like, but with precautions in how you manage > firmware and drivers, it's workable. > Luckily no tg3 for this server. It does have the bnx2 driver. Do you have any specific driver / firmware version comments about which combinations do work and which don't? > You'll want to check your tg3/bnx2/whatever driver version and NIC > firmware version, depending on your investigation. > I have version 1.9.3 of bnx2. Not sure how to get the NIC firmware version on a running system. > Shared nics can work great, but some implementations can be picky about > what drivers and firmware are in place. > This being a HPC cluster shared nics was the more feasible option. The cost of a dedicated out-of-band network and switches was deemed too expensive and messy. As such no one server is critical but the utility of the BMC+IMPI is the ability to debug crashes without having to walk to the server room each time. Or so I thought! :) > Also, newer is not always better, sometimes a developer without caring > about the IPMI access provided by some nics will unwittingly break it > somehow in the driver, and it won't get fixed until some server vendor or > other industrious administrator stumbles across it. > Absolutely. Agreed. Unfortunately there's no easy way of knowing what works and what doesn't other than posting on a list like this and hoping someone else has been burnt before! :) Thanks again! -- Rahul
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