On Mar 10, 12:55 pm, Pasi Kärkkäinen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 02:26:51PM -0800, Murray wrote:
> > We've got a
>
> > Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12)
> > centos 5.4
> > iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.871-0.12.el5_4.1
>
> > I've been trying without success to make the iscsi mounts stop
> > disconnecting like clockwork after about 10-24 hours. When it works,
> > the performance is fantastic, blazing fast. However, we need it to
> > work for more than 24 hours in a row. Apparently, this may be due to
> > problems with the bnx and bnx2i driver. We're looking at buying a new
> > network card that will work with iscsi reliably. At this point, the
> > thought is to just change the hardware. The Broadcom support seems
> > dubious at best.
>
> > Would anyone in the iscsi community recommend a network card and a
> > module that they know works reliably with centos5.x?
>
> 1. Does removing bnx2i help? ie. try using the plain normal tcp transport 
> without broadcom hw accel.
>
> 2. if the above helps, then you could try updating to the latest RHEL 5.5 
> beta kernel + iscsi-utils,
>    those have bugfixes for bnx2i.
>
> -- Pasi

While modinfo reports that bnx2i is the iscsi driver for this card, /
var/log/messages reports otherwise.
What seems to happen is that the system attempts to load the bnx2i
module, fails and then falls back to bnx2. This was when I had forced
eth1 to use bnx2i via /etc/modprobe.conf :

Mar  8 17:51:37 ndsfdh1 kernel: iscsi: registered transport (bnx2i)
Mar  8 17:52:48 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2: eth1: using MSI
Mar  8 17:52:48 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2i: iSCSI not supported, dev=eth1
Mar  8 17:52:50 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2i: iSCSI not supported, dev=eth1
Mar  8 17:52:51 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2: eth1 NIC Copper Link is Up, 1000
Mbps full

So, from what I can tell it uses the bnx2 driver. Disconnects follow
within hours which require the raid array itself to be rebooted before
another successful iscsi login can be made. Is that what you mean by
"using plain normal tcp transport without broadcom hw accel"?
Admittedly, I am not sure how to prove I am using "plain normal tcp
transport". Or should I completely remove bnx2i somehow? I don't see
the module loaded, but the disconnects happen anyway.

My colleague suggested just getting another card and trying something
known to work, perhaps cheaper than trying to get the broadcom stuff
to work.

It's not clear to me the relationship between the two modules. Are
they dependent or should they be loaded independently or just one and
not the other? Can/should one run bnx2i on one interface and bnx2 on
the other?

thanks for your time.
-Jonathan

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"open-iscsi" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/open-iscsi?hl=en.

Reply via email to