Dell PE1950 NIC Firmware Workaround

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There is a bug in the IPMI management portion of the firmware on the integrated Broadcom NICs. Dell expects to have a fix available by Fall 2006. In the meantime, this feature needs to be disabled.

Systems Affected

Dell PowerEdge 1950 Servers with integrated Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

Procedure

Before proceeding, Sam Chu <sam.chu@intel.com> has reported that he "upgraded the Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 firmware to 1.8.2 and the network is working again".

  • First, contact Mike Freemon for two CDs that you'll need. For lurkers, there's nothing special about these CDs, just burn your own. See links below for software download locations.
    • DOS 6.22 Bootable CD
    • Broadcom NetXtreme II MS-DOS Utilities
  • Boot the PE1950 into DOS using the DOS 6.22 CD
  • After boot, remove the DOS CD and insert the Broadcom Utilities CD
  • Switch to the R: drive, list the directory (for the fun of it), and change directory into the Userdiag directory 
 R:
 dir
 cd Userdiag
  • Display the current status of the NICs 
 uxdiag -help
 uxdiag -ver

You should see something similar to: 

     Brd:Rv Bus      PCI    Spd Base  IRQ     MAC    FmwVer Configuration
 1:5708C:B1 04:00:00 PCIE-4 2.5 0xF800 6 001372F8CA7A 1.8.0 MF,auto

Note the "MF" under the Configuration heading.

  • Disable the management firmware on integrated NIC 
 uxdiag -c 1 -mfw 0 -t abcd
  • If there is a second card listed by the uxdiag -ver command, then it is not disabled in the BIOS. In this case, disable the firmware on the second NIC as well 
 uxdiag -c 2 -mfw 0 -t abcd
  • Now, the result of a uxdiag -ver command should be: 
     Brd:Rv Bus      PCI    Spd Base  IRQ     MAC    FmwVer Configuration
 1:5708C:B1 04:00:00 PCIE-4 2.5 0xF800 6 001372F8CA7A 1.8.0 auto

Note that the "MF" under the Configuration heading is now gone.

  • Remove CD and reboot

References

Broadcom DOS Utility Bcom_LAN_NX2_26_DOSUtilities_A00

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.hardware.dell.poweredge/23276

MS-DOS Bootable CD Image www.bootdisks.us

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