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.
[edit] Systems Affected
Dell PowerEdge 1950 Servers with integrated Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC
[edit] 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
[edit] 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
