Network problems with 1950 and Xen

[mpeters at mpeters.f2s.com]

Quoting Ronan Mullally <ronan at iol.ie>:

> On Fri, 3 Aug 2007, Ronan Mullally wrote:
>
> > I've done a bit of digging and it looks like it's a firmware problem on
> > the Broadcom ethernet cards - see:
> >
> >   http://mywiki.ncsa.uiuc.edu/wiki/Dell_PE1950_NIC_Firmware_Workaround
>
> I've made a bit of progress on this and managed to find a compromise
> between having LAN access to the BMC and a working dom0 network.
>
> Following the instructions above, I disabled the management firmware on
> the second nic (Gb2) and set the BMC LAN channel to Shared.  I then
> configured the IP stack in the OS on Gb2.
>
> This effectively means that I've got the nothing on Gb1 but the BMC while
> the OS (dom0 and guests) sits on Gb2.  Not pretty, but it works.
>
> For the Dell folks on this list, can I suggest you prioritise this bug?
> It's enough for me to recommend to my customers that they avoid this kit
> (I'm tarring the 1950 and 2950 with the same brush here) for server
> virtualisation and consolidation projects.
>
>
I'm currently running Xen on a couple of 2950's and we had similar issues
initially. However they seem to have been fixed by using the following drivers
from dell:

http://linux.dell.com/files/bnx2/xen-fix/

along with the latest firmware updates.

--
Mike Peters
Website: http://www.ice2o.com