Dell Poweredge 1950 with Intel Quad Port Ethernet

techuser — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:57:37 +0000

Keywords:

1950

pcie

I've spent the last couple of days configuring a batch of new Dell servers, 1950 rackmounts. A couple of them have Intel four port cards fitted (PRO/1000 Quad Port) and need to run Linux (the rest, FreeBSD).

The servers were bought from Dell on the understanding that they'd be immediately compatible with a bog-standard Linux install.

Well, I've been bitten by that before. Do NOT let sales people to spec a computer. Do NOT trust Windows users to spec a Linux machine.

Before we get to the add-in card, let's look at the internal pair of ethernet ports. With FreeBSD these were fine - FreeBSD's driver support is surprisingly robust. Something for Linux developers to take a look at perhaps?

Under Linux I had a significant problem: they did not work.
To cut a long and arduous tale short (this was a WHOLE day wasted):

1. The Dell machines ship with TOE (traffic offload engine) enabled. No good. Firstly, it doesn't work with Linux. Secondly, when they do work, it's with binary drivers. Thirdly, when your machine is going to be a firewall, you don't want some feature-sparse hardware taking over from the highly tuned Linux firewall stack you're using.

To disable TOE is fairly simple: pop the top off the machine, and somewhere around where the power plugs into the motherboard is a little dongle, a little like an ethernet jack. Remove it. The hardware is built into the motherboard, but somehow we seem to have been sold the dongles - I assume they're like licenses.

2. The ports are reversed! eth0 attaches to port 2, eth1 to port 1. I can see this being a support issue in years to come.

Onwards to the add in card: again, did not work. Thank you Dell, I suppose zero out of two isn't bad really. It could have exploded when I plugged it in?

There is no support in the Linux kernel for this new Intel card. Intel's own site takes you to the e1000 driver modules. Well, I thought - maybe that's because they're an updated version compared to the e1000 in the latest 2.6.24 kernel patches? No. Still did not work.

Eventually I find my way here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000
Sourceforge.net has a newer version of Intel's own e1000 driver, .5 verses .4!
But also I find that there is a new driver for the newest gigabit hardware: igb. Aha, maybe this is what I need? Yes, one rapid download and 'make install' later, the ports fire into life. "igb" is the driver to try if you have a new Intel quad port card. Hopefully this will make its way into the kernel otherwise supporting the machine with kernel upgrades is bound to fail eventually when someone forgets to put the drivers back on - thankfully this is part of a high-availability firewall, using Heartbeat (and lots of bash/ifconfig/ip/tc/iptables scripting). An identical second machine will come online within seconds when the first fails.

Technological Wanderings - ethernet

Dell Poweredge 1950 with Intel Quad Port Ethernet