Re: [Etherboot-users] Broadcom 5721 & PXE

[Don C. <dj...@ci...>]

Hardy, Chris wrote:
> The company I work for recently bought a few Dell 850s.  These come with
> Broadcom 5721's onboard.  
> 
> Lately we've been transitioning from disk based booting to PXE booting.
> As I started to research the driver options for the chipset, I found
> Timothy's Patch:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=11397437
> 
> I've applied that to the source tree, rebuilt the images, and the Dell
> host will now find the card, it will then search for an IP address,
> after which it will report a "transmit time out" which is found only in
> the tg3.c code.
> 
> I've added printf's to see if  I can confirm that the card is being
> initialized (which it does look like) and to confirm that the card isn't
> changing link state (which may cause problems to the Cisco switch that
> it's hooked into). It looks like the card may not be putting packets out
> onto the network.
> 
> Any one willing to help, or at least throw me a bone so I can go
> searching in the right direction?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chris

Well, even if you don't think that link state isn't changing, you
should put the port into portfast mode ("spanning-tree portfast")
if you can, just to be sure.  It's not uncommon for PXE to fail when
the machine is connected to a port that is not so configured.

-Don

-- 
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
dj...@ci...         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
   "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."