After days of installations and grief setting up a brand new dell sc440 to run on Suse 10.1 x86_64 an update killed the server network, Broadcom integrated 57xx tg3.
The kernel is now, after the update, 2.6.16.27-0.9-smp x86_64 system. It works perfectly if I re-install from the CD/DVD package but as soon as the first update is complete the network will just not work. The module is there the card is detected but no connection at all.
I have re-installed and re-installed, Googled the problem and followed numerous threads trying too many things to list but I cannot get the updated suse to connect to the network. A server without a network is a chocolate teapot.
Are you sure it’s SuSE 10.1 you have ? IIRC there are no updates for it as it is discontinued,so, any updates are out of date anyway.Could you be using SLED 10 with SP1 ?
Thanks for the reply and sorry for some reason I thought I had 10.1
The CD/DVD package bought for and supplied by Dell is SLES 100.001. Its not SP1 as the next update is SP1 which of course I cant do because of no network card The very first update after registering the product is the one that kills the Network. So if I delay this I can use the machine. At the moment it is in after update mode with no connection.
I have wondered whether Dell have passed off an old package as their super Dell software management CD didn’t work with the SUSE package and I had to download an older version of the Dell software. Since then I have just been installing directly from the SUSE package as I was attempting to follow and load the Perfect Setup …
Thought I would update the post as it might help someone else that cant find the solution or spend days searching, as I did.
Using another machine I decided to download SUSE 10 SP1 (SLES-10-SP1-x86_64-DVD1.iso) from the SUSE site here. NOVELL: Downloads
You do need to login or register.
I then burnt to CD, run this selecting UPDATE from the first menu. I didn’t change any other settings as the install progressed. As soon as the system re-booted the network was up and running. NOTE: The chip installed is the Broadcom BCM5754. You will find the chip close to the network socket on the motherboard. Its about 1cm with tiny writing.
Just in case further updates killed the network again I made sure all were done and re-booted without problem.
I then managed to install ispconfig, which was the original plan, without any problems at all.
So I can conclude from this that the package I was supplied without SP1 as never going to work correctly as it repeatedly killed the network on the first SUSE update. No amount of re-installing the drivers worked and I spent days on this machine.
I would recommend if you’re buying a DEL server like this SC440 with Broadcom NIC make sure they supply at least version 10 SP1. This will also make installing ISPconfig and probably other software much easier.