Eugene There are known problems with the Broadcom implementation of the TCP Offload Engine; if the chipset is on the motherboard and the bios has TCP/OE support, disable it, and then also disable the OE in your driver configuration [see note below]. If the chipset is on a plugin card then you may need to investigate the settings on the card setup instead of the system bios.
Essentially, for both 100mb and gigabit networking via modern auto-sensing gigabit L2/L3 switches OE shouldn't be required. Note also that there are known incompatabilities between various makes of NIC and other makes of switches; some pairings work flawlessly, others work more or less well in most situations, whilst yet others are marginal at best, however firmware revisions and models of NIC can also affect things, as can driver versions. I'm currently investigating an issue of this type with a set of Dell workstations most of which have Broadcom NICs, talking to an exchange server via a Netgear L2 switch, some of the workstations are generating lots of inbound errors [1 in 5 packets failing]: yet avg. network utilisation is <12%. Changing the NICs removes the problem; turning off TOE on the original NICs also cures the problem. But many of those workstations which don't generate errors /also/ have Broadcom NICs - but with different models and driver versions. Note2: to disable offload engine in Windows, go to Start, Settings, LAN Connections, select your connection's properties, Configure NIC, Advanced, disable TOE. If the server is multihomed or 2 or more NICs are teamed then all NICs must be set the same way. Robert _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
