tg3 network cards

[Michael Tautschnig]

[...]

>> ipconfig is part of the klibc-utils package and most likely just tries to get an
>> answer from your DHCP server at that very moment. 
>
> Ah, didn't know that's where it came from - thanks for the tip.  Re:  
> 'most likely tries...' - really?  It doesn't just use the info supplied  
> to the card initially when it boots up, DHCP's, and proceeds via PXE?  I  
> submit, I tried to dump the binary with 'strings', but not much research  
> beyond that yet (I'm exhausted today, been working for a long time).
>

Yes, it does DHCP on its own, no re-use of PXE's info at all (actually, I don't
know whether that would be available at all to Linux anyway). I think, by
default ipconfig eth0 will just do DHCP on eth0.

>> If you get your system to boot
>> by some other means, you could safely copy over ipconfig from your Debian
>>   
>
> Ubuntu.  I apologized for only making a passing reference to that at the  
> end of my OP.
>
Oh, yes, sorry, spotted your mention of Ubuntu. But that shouldn't matter that
much, just use klibc from your Ubuntu boxes :-)

>> systems and just run it on the console manually to see what happens.
>>   
>
> I tested this on a VM, and it also killed networking.  But, the VM has a  
> virtual interface, and may not be a very good test, even if the results  
> were the same.  I'll try to test ipconfig on a physical network  
> interface to see if I hit the same problem.  But, like I said, I've  
> installed other servers the same way successfully, the only difference  
> being they had nice Intel cards, not a crappy Broadcom card.
>
Well, as long as the VM shows a very similar behavior, it will be useful for
debugging from there, even though you might end up having debugged two different
issues :-)

[...]
>> Other than that, there is also the frequently discussed issue of systems with
>> more than one NIC -- your ipconfig may simply be trying to get a response from
>> the DHCP server over some interface that doesn't have any cable plugged in.
>>   
>
> I suppose that could be the case - hadn't even occurred to me.  The box  
> does have dual on-board NIC's, so that is a viable suggestion.  I'll do  
> some more research on that front, see what comes of it.  Thanks for the  
> suggestion.
>

Woo, two things to check first:
- There are known issues with some Broadcom cards and their IPMI firmware. You
  may or may not be able to apply these bugfixes (I think it required some DOS
  boot disk :-( ) and they might also fully disable IPMI. I guess the net may
  help you further along. But AFAIK the symptoms were a bit different (DHCP was
  fine, but no NFS afterwards, and somewhat Xen-related).
- The easier one: Check the MAC address of the interface the initrd is trying to
  run ipconfig on. This should help you to find out whether it is using the
  correct link.

HTH,
Michael

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