BL460C GB NIC problem

[Theoneandonly]

Hi all,

I've installed 8 blades with proliant 460C with NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter (not teamed, yet). Since the beginning, I have upload communication problem (from LAN to blades). These blades are connected to a D-Link 16 port Smart Switch DGS-1216T, which is uplinked to a cascaded Nortel Stack at max 100Mb. If the speed from the servers is ok (from 8 to 10MB), the opposite can't go above 100KB...Checked and changed everything everywhere(flow control, forced ports speed, spanning three, port priority, NIC drivers,...) with no luck. The D-link does not show any errors, the Nortel does(FCS ones, I've no idead what this is)and HP NIC tools shows in the statistics a lots of "No Buffer", "Receive Errors" and TCP Offload Errors. Any idea where the problem could be ?

Thanks in advance

 

[blister911]

Some of the older switches don't play well with the new Gigabit adapters. Check on whether or not you can update the firmware/IOS/bois (whatever its called) on the switches. If not, can you plug it into a different switch (newer and/or different brand/model) to check to see if it isn't just a switch issue?

We have a couple of Cisco switches in our test/setup lab that had a similar issue with a dl385 G2 (uses the same NIC: NC373i). I set both the switch and the server to 100MB Full Duplex, but instead it only ran at 10MB Half. When we went into production I removed the forced speed and duplex settings and plugged it into a Gigabit switch and it runs perfectly.

Good Luck

 

[Theoneandonly]

Thanks blister, but I found the cause (I could have searched for long, but as they say, the more simple explanation...)
Fact was FCS error (the most significants) are related to either card transceiver, or cable. I changed the cable (the only thing I did not do ) and don't have these errors anymore.

 

[Davidaperry]

There seems to be a problem with the NC373i Multifunction Gigabit adapter in the HP Proliant GL380 G5 servers. HP will not consider it a defect, however these adapters do not work well communicating over a PTP circuit that is connected by 2 Cisco 3500 Switches. Most other Servers that have other built in Adaptors work fine.

The issue we are having is when we try to map a network drive from on Server with Windows 2003 Server into another Server that has this NC373i Multifunction Gigabit adaptor.

You can map the network drive ok. the problem is when you try to view data from Windows Explorer (My Computer)
You double click on the drive and you see nothing.

We also tried the Dos dir command and we get the message file not found. But I did find that we could use the Dos copy command and we could copy files if we know the name of the file.

I also noticed that there are errors like TCP offload errors etc.

I can compare this to an example. Lets say you have 2 wireless routers and one of them has a low range. It will work fine with PCs that are close to it, so the manufature will tell you that there is nothing wrong with it. But if you need to connect to PC's that are farther away you will need to buy a stronger router. The same issue with this NC373i Multifunction Gigabit adapter. It is like the signal, packet transfer or something else about it is not strong enough to communicate over a long distance fiber PTP circuit. So you will either have to buy a new NIC card or fix the signal boosters on the PTP, or buy a different server that has a different type of NIC card that works better.

If anybody wants, I can share the log from Wireshark which shows a whole bunch of TCP bad checksum errors. I do not know if there will ever be a patch for this card or if there is some specific setting that needs to be modified, in order for it to work properly!