e1000 card and DHCP network install

[Rick Stevens]

Poole, John J wrote:
> Help,
>      We have a Redhat WS 3 network install server and install our machines with kickstart via DHCP and NFS. The PC's with Intel e1000 cards will not allow
> NFS on our network. We are currently using 10 mb half-duplex. The DHCP appears to work fine but reading the kickstart file fails with unable to nfs mount. I
> have read about many problems with this card and NFS. I thought it might be Auto negotiate timeout so I downloaded the latest e1000 source from Intel,
> configured it to 10/half as default and put the driver in modules.cgz. It still fails NFS mount during the kickstart network install. 
>    Has any one figured out what I might set in the e1000_params.c file to allow a kickstart file with card? I am a sysadmin(not a programmer) so you can
> imagine the time and effort I spent doing the above(thanks to those who published the instructions on the web). Any help or suggestions doing a network
> install with an e1000 card would be appreciated.

What kind of switch are you using?  Often the autonegotion is broken
between the switch and the cards.  The most common culprits I've found
are Cisco switches--we've never had an issue with our Extreme Networks
stuff (Summit 4, Summit 48, Summit 48e, Black Diamond), but lots of
our Cisco gear has issues (even with the latest IOS updates).

The best bet is to force both the cards AND the switch ports to some
specific setting.  Do NOT rely on autonegotion on EITHER end.  Start out
with 1G full duplex and work your way down.  I'll bet everything's happy
once you kill autonegotiation.

Also, for your NFS mounts, make sure you use TCP rather than the default
UDP.  The entries in your /etc/fstab should look something like:

     server:/share   /mountpoint   nfs   nfsvers=3,tcp,other-options 0 0

UDP gets very confused on high speed, high use networks.  TCP stops the
dropped packet/retry storm that often occurs.  Trust me...it fixes a
plethora of weird NFS problems.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-             To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.               -
----------------------------------------------------------------------