Broadcom NIC delays prevent DHCP during Kickstart

[Nicola_Worthington at McAfee.com]

I'm also seeing this problem, but only on our PowerEdge servers. -- It
doesn't happen with out IBM NetVistas. --
 
We do not have spanning tree enabled. Our switching is pretty vanilla,
with the odd vlan.
 
We have a DHCP master and slave which respond within 5 seconds to the
PXE DHCP requests. When kickstart asks DHCP for an IP it *always* fails.
We don't see the requests come in to the DHCP servers. If we retry, it
will usually fail. We have found that sometimes unplugging the
kickstarting machine from the network after it has PXE booted, leaving
it a couple of minutes and then retrying, will sometimes fix the
problem, but this isn't a propper solution. We'd much rather try to find
out what's going wrong and get kickstart to play nicely on our PowerEdge
servers than move to fixed IP kickstarts.
 
We're seeing the problem on 750s, 1850s, 1950s and 2850s.


________________________________

	From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Kevin Kwast
	Sent: 20 October 2006 05:06
	To: Mann, Andrew; Linux-PowerEdge at dell.com
	Subject: Re: Broadcom NIC delays prevent DHCP during Kickstart
	
	
	In my case, sure, spanning tree is on because every 5324 switch
is interconnected with at least one other, and I haven't used the web
interface to repeatedly set STP off for every port that is connected to
a host.  Maybe the command line offers a way to turn off STP for 21 or
22 ports at a time on each switch?  I know that STP can cause delays
after bringing up the ethernet link on a port, but Intel NICs don't seem
to have this problem.  Is there a way to keep the ethernet link up
between when the PXE boot uses it and the kickstarting Linux kernel
tries to DHCP?  Or add 30 seconds to the amount of time it waits before
it does the DHCP?  Thanks! 
	
	
	On 10/19/06, Mann, Andrew <amann at ea.com> wrote: 


		> Is spanning tree enabled on the switch?
		
		  Is there a conflict with the Broadcom NICs and
spanning tree?  We're
		using a Cisco 4500 series switch with spanning tree
enabled.  2550s,
		1750s, 1850s, and 1955 blades are able to quickly bring
the NIC up and 
		start communicating.  2650s and 2950s have about a 30-60
second delay
		between the time the NIC is enabled and communication
succeeds.  After a
		reboot, we have to run through and restart NTP on each
of these types of 
		system since this delay causes the ntp startup to fail.
It's only been
		mildly annoying in the past, but getting rid of it would
be nice :)
		
		
		Andrew
		
		


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