HP DL140

[Justin Crabtree]

Mark A. Hoover wrote:
>>From: Justin Crabtree <crabtrej at otc.edu>
>>
>>We are looking at buying a couple of HP DL140s with dual 3.06GHz Xeons, 
>>2GB of memory and two 80GB ATA hard drives.  Anyone have experience 
>>installing Fedora on these systems?
> 
> 
> I don't know if Fedora has fixed the problem, but we have a bunch of them 
> installed with RHES.  The DL140s come with Broadcom BCM5700 NIC 
> interfaces.  I've used the tg3 driver, the bcm5700 from Broadcom's 
> website, and the bcm5700 driver from HP.  All three of them have an issue 
> where the ifup script returns the interface as being available, but the 
> first 6-50 packets disappear into the bit bucket.
> 
> On 10/100 switches, we fixed this by hard-setting the ports to 100full and 
> not to autonegotiate.  Unfortauntely, gigabit ethernet expects to 
> autonegotiate.  This causes problems with automatic NFS mounts via 
> /etc/fstab as the interface is reported as up, but NFS can't mount and 
> backgrounds the process.  Resulting in a system where you have to login 
> and manually mount anything that didn't do so automatically.
> 
> There seems to be a lot of discussion on this issue on various message 
> boards (including HP'), but no solution from what I can find.
> 
> FYI: The newer DL360s come with the same NIC.
> 

So, did everything else work okay with Fedora?  We want to use these 
servers for LDAP and the version that comes with FC3 is more current 
than RHEL3 so we would like to be able to install FC3 on them.  I would 
expect that Redhat would want the NIC issue fixed since RHEL4 is based 
on FC3 and they will want HP to be able to sell these servers with RHEL4 
when it comes out.  Anyone know if this is fixed already or when it will 
be fixed?


Justin Crabtree
Java Programmer
Ozarks Technical Community College
799-1573