HP DL140

[Mark A. Hoover]

> From: Justin Crabtree <crabtrej at otc.edu>
> 
> We are looking at buying a couple of HP DL140s with dual 3.06GHz Xeons, 
> 2GB of memory and two 80GB ATA hard drives.  Anyone have experience 
> installing Fedora on these systems?

I don't know if Fedora has fixed the problem, but we have a bunch of them 
installed with RHES.  The DL140s come with Broadcom BCM5700 NIC 
interfaces.  I've used the tg3 driver, the bcm5700 from Broadcom's 
website, and the bcm5700 driver from HP.  All three of them have an issue 
where the ifup script returns the interface as being available, but the 
first 6-50 packets disappear into the bit bucket.

On 10/100 switches, we fixed this by hard-setting the ports to 100full and 
not to autonegotiate.  Unfortauntely, gigabit ethernet expects to 
autonegotiate.  This causes problems with automatic NFS mounts via 
/etc/fstab as the interface is reported as up, but NFS can't mount and 
backgrounds the process.  Resulting in a system where you have to login 
and manually mount anything that didn't do so automatically.

There seems to be a lot of discussion on this issue on various message 
boards (including HP'), but no solution from what I can find.

FYI: The newer DL360s come with the same NIC.