How Broadcom and Dell wasted three days of my time....

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Another one of my late posts. Susan actually already posted about it here and here. She referred to them as Evil. I will refer to them as possessed.

I am going to skip all the detail and simply say that ISA 2004 completely died and stopped routing traffic due to crappy Broadcom drivers. Even top level Microsoft support had troubles tracking it down to bad drivers.

On Susan's blog, users have said that uninstalling the Dell preinstalled drivers and installing the Broadcom drivers fixed the issue. At the time however, this did not work for me... unless they released updated drivers since Dec 2006??

Anyway, my recommendation is to simply request Intel network cards when you order your Dell server. Just to be on the safe side.

Posted: Jan 06 2007, 01:41 PM by NickWhittome | with 9 comment(s)

Filed under: Small Business Server, Dell, Rants

Comments

Eskil said:

Thanks a lot for your posting!

I had the exact same problem with ISA2006, Dell and Broadcom. It just doesn't work. - In the end I decided to use the Dell/Broadcom server to something else - and installed ISA2006 on a Dell/Intel server.

# January 16, 2007 9:32 AM

Nick Whittome - "The Naked MVP" said:

A while back I posted about how Broadcom and it’s TOE system in the Dell PowerEdge 2900 stops ISA

# March 12, 2007 12:46 PM

Wintel Dude said:

Dell Poweredge

Issue with broadcom drivers is that you either need to enable or disable toe functionality on the nic within the bios.

By default the TOE is enabled but smp is disabled other workaround is to disable in advanced settings on the nic is receice side scaling to be disabled.

# March 20, 2007 1:46 AM

NickWhittome said:

Yes, but disabling the functionality at a hardware level requires unplugging the RJ Connector on the motherboard. Doing that alone still does not work. (There is no BIOS option).

So... the problem still exists. Even with the SP2 Update.

# March 20, 2007 5:03 AM

carrmic said:

It is most likely due to TOE which is enabled with the Microsoft Scalable Networking Pack. You can disable TOE with this command line:

netsh int ip set chimney disable

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912222

Dell's instructions for the Broadcom chip mention that firewalls won't work with TOE enabled:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe2950/multlang/nic_toe/HM430A1MR.pdf

Firewalls and TOE

Installing or activating firewall applications disables TOE for all TOE-enabled NICs in a system.

A firewall application must examine all incoming packets and frames to implement its protection

mechanisms. This firewall function is incompatible with the packet-offload operation of TOE.

# April 13, 2007 1:34 PM

Norbert Fehlauer said:

Had some trouble with Broadcom NetXtreme II cards too.

Using the latest Broadcom drivers alone did not solve my problem. We had some Cisco IP Phones between Computers and the switch. This caused slow download performance. If I removed the phone it was as you would expect a 1GB/s connection.

This is my workaround:

1. Deactivate Receive Side Scaling in Windows

support.microsoft.com/.../en-us

To work around this problem, disable Receive Side Scaling when the computer is configured as an Internet Connection Sharing gateway. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

3. On the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, and then type EnableRSS.

4. Double-click EnableRSS, type 0, and then click OK.

5. Restart the computer on which you changed the EnableRSS value.

2. Deactivate TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine)

support.microsoft.com/.../en-us

To turn off TCP Chimney by using the Netsh.exe tool, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

2. At the command prompt, type Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED, and then press ENTER.

# May 30, 2007 10:31 AM

Pie8ter said:

We bought three Poweredge 2950s with Broadcom Netxtreme II 1gbit NICs. The servers fails to work with 1gbit switches. It seems Dell and Broadcom is a match made in hell. I've wasted five hours yesterday trying to figure out why all other no name servers with Intel NICs work fine with 1gbit switches but not Dell.

# July 30, 2007 5:03 AM

Dag Staale Jenssen said:

Hi!

In may case I have a PE2950 (delivered on Fryday) with SBS Server R2 (Open License), to NIC Broadcom NetIIExtreme, and ISA 2004 is installed end working. The first installation fail in the sense that ISA 2004 services would not start and ICW would fail. To get it up running I unplug the TOE license chip on the motherboard. Reinstalled SBS 2003 R2 with to NIC but not ISA. Run ICW testing internet connectivity, it was working. Then installed ISA 2004, not running ICW. On reboot some ISA Services did not start. Then I installed ISA SP3. After reboot I run ICW. It is now working as far as I can see.

# October 17, 2007 8:47 AM

Sifu said:

I am guessing that this is not specific to Dell. I am reading this and nodding along but I am using a Broadcom nic in an HP machine.

# November 22, 2008 12:51 PM

Nick Whittome - The Naked MVP

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