Hello,

OS RedHat 5.5, Server Model: HP Proliant DL 380 G7

We swapped our 10Gig NIC Cards (Qlogic) with Emulex NIC cards NC550SFP. The server was rebooted and I get the following message:

dmesg | grep -i "emulex"

be2net 0000:18:00.0: Emulex OneConnect 10Gbps NIC initialization failed
be2net 0000:18:00.1: Emulex OneConnect 10Gbps NIC initialization failed

Earlier when there was Qlogic, we configured the two NIC cards for eth2 and eth3.

Now, in order for this server to show up these NICs, I used ifcfg -a and configured ifcfg-eth2 and ifcfg-eth3 and did a service network reload. The interface came up and all worked good.

But after the Qlogic was replaced with the Emulex and when I perform ifcfg -a, I don't see eth2 and eth3 or neither they are shown as some other names such as __tmp. I can't find the MAC addressess that are associated with them.

Is there any way that we can initialize these NIC cards and make them available in ifcfg -a so that, I can edit the mac ids of these NICs and configre ifcfg-eth2 and ifcfg-eth3.

It would be great if any geek would shower some light on this.

Thank you very much in advance....

Hi there,

As I can understand when you use Emulex NICs you get initialization fail error message. However, it works fine with Qlogic NICs. The reason that I can think of is incorrect drivers. As you said it works perfectly fine with Qlogic NICs and you are able to edit the settings from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* but ifcfg-* does not appear when you use Emulex NICs.

Just a bit of information on how the driver works. Kernel loads the driver and then driver searches for the corresponding device, if driver is unable to find the device for which it is build it fails and the device is failed to load.

Most of the hardware modules are automatically detected but if your system is failing to detect the hardware module I would suggest you to give a try to the following command:

depmod -a

This will scan through the modules and create an output file modules.dep. Once this is done you can load the hardware module required by the hardware using the following command:

modprobe module_name

Also, it will be interesting to see the output of the following command with Emulex NICs attached:

modprobe -lt net