RHEL4: cannot kickstart clients with Broadcom DCM5751 Gigabit

[Iain Conochie]

Brian Long wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 09:39 +0100, Alex TOURNIER wrote:
> 
>>I have a serious problem with a RHEL4 KS installation.
>>My KS server works well because I can perform installation with no 
>>problems on various hardware plaforms.
>>However the latest hardware platform I was delivered (ie Siemens Celsius 
>>R630) the installation fails.
>>I am almost sure that the problem is with the NIC (Broadcom NetXtreme 
>>DCM 5751 Gigabit ), it looks like the NIC is somehow turned off (even 
>>if  enabled in the BIOS) , or not working at the right speed and thus 
>>the DHCP server is not able to assign the IP. On the DHCP server nothing 
>>appears in the log file (as if there was no communication at all). I 
>>boot the client from a CD  (made  with the images available on the 1st 
>>CD of RHEL 4 distrib)....I also tried to make another CD including the 
>>driver from BROADCOM (bcm5700.ko instead of tg3.ho), but no success. If 
>>I disable the Broadcom NIC, and insert a second NIC the KS install works 
>>fine using this second NIC!!!!

I have seen a similar issue and i believe that this has been discussed 
before. However, it goes something like this

Once booted, the server will then ask for a DHCP IP address. This has 
the side effect of resetting the network card and consequently the port 
on the switch. The DHCP request can time out here as the time that the 
NIC and the switch take to re-negotiate the link.

This may or may not be your issue; i would hazard a guess it is because 
it does seem to be linked to the Broadcom chipset you describe. Once 
DHCP fails, do you try again? Does this work the second time? What 
switch hardware are you using?

Cheers

Iain

>>
>>I would be very happy of any advice that could help me in solving the 
>>problem, I have many of these PC to be installed, and I need disperatly 
>>a  KS solution...
>>Thank you in advance.
> 
> 
> Alex,
> 
> We have the HP XW4300 workstation which has BCM5752.  I don't know if
> your issue is the same as ours, but only RHEL 3 U6 and RHEL 4 U2 work.
> You don't mention which update of RHEL 4 you are kickstarting.  Is it
> U2?  If not, please try U2 as it contains an updated tg3 driver for the
> newest Broadcom chipsets.
> 
> /Brian/
> 
> 


-- 
Iain Conochie UNIX System Administrator UK
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