Recently I ordered a new server for my company, a HP DL380G6 to be precise. We already have the previous generation of these servers (G5) and are very happy about them. It’s a beast with 5 network cards (4 usable by the OS, 1 for ILO management); in our setup we only need one active NIC, so I went to the BIOS and deactivated all NICs except the first one…then I installed CentOS 5.3.
I’m not really sure about it, but there seems to be a bug in the current BIOS revision which has a rather annoying consequence: if you only activate ONE NIC in the BIOS, the OS can’t see it. As soon as you activate 2+ NICs, the OS sees all of them. And by “see” I mean that they even don’t show up in an “lspci”… Odd. This probably also happens on RHEL 5.3, which is an officially supported OS by HP on this machine.
Here are the culprits:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
02:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
Well from experience I would say disabling interfaces in the BIOS is a bad idea. Because if you ever need to use an interface you’ve disabled like this you’re going to have to reboot and this means downtime…
Plus you don’t really gain anything by disabling them…
Hello,
i have the same problem. The NICs are activated and was known by lspci/the kernel, but they are not working
The bnx2 module is loaded but there are no IF !
Any ideas ?
It just seems to be a stupid bug…try to update the firmwares with the latest 8.70 CD from the HP site or just les the other NICs activated…