RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?

[Shabazian, Chip]

Are you on the same switch and subnet that you have previously had good
kickstarts from?  This is USUALLY an error related to portfast and Cisco
switches.  The fact that the install works fine using the included
driver when you build from CD adds to my suspicion that this is network,
not NIC related.
 
Chip

________________________________

From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Doug Rylaarsdam
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 11:36 AM
To: kickstart-list at redhat.com
Subject: RHEL3U8 pxe install: no driver for Broadcom NIC?



Hi,

 

I am having a NIC driver problem with pxe kickstart of RHEL3 update 8 on
some new hardware (Sun X2100 M2).

 

The vendor documentation indicates that RHEL3 U7 or later has compatible
drivers for this server. When I install RHEL3 U8 from CD, it works ok.
When I attempt a pxe kickstart, it appears that the NIC driver is not
compatible. I get the "no network device in choosenetworkinterface"
message. I have been kickstarting RHEL3U3 for some time (on older
hardware), so I think in general that I have a working pxe kickstart
server environment.

 

The NIC is a Broadcom device. The server vendor supplies the Broadcom
drivers, but not in binary form for RHEL3 U8. Based on my limited
understanding of how this works, I would need to build the tg3 driver
from source against the boot kernel (2.4.21-47.ELBOOT) if I want to use
the Broadcom NIC for a network install. Then I would need to add the new
driver to the initrd image, or make it available as a driver disk. When
I look inside the initrd image, the tg3.o driver is definitely not
identical to the tg3.o driver from the CD install, although that doesn't
prove that the tg3 driver available during kickstart is incompatible
with my hardware. 

 

Does it seem likely that RHEL3 U8 would contain a compatible driver for
the Broadcom NIC for the 2.4.21-47.EL kernel, but that the driver for
the boot kernel is not compatible? That seemed odd to me, so I thought I
would ask the question before proceeding with building the driver from
source, somewhat unfamiliar territory for me (especially building for
boot kernels). Or might there be another cause to this problem? 

 

Thanks,

 

Doug

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