SPLAT interface numbering

[ChadB]

Hopefully a quick question. I have Sun X4200-M2 servers, each with 2 Quad Intel NIC's. If I disable the onboard NVIDIA NIC cards (eth0/eth1), will the interface numbering in regards to SPLAT start from 0 on the Intel cards? Or will it just look like I have eth2 - eth11? Since I had to ship the servers off for my counterparts to assist in setting up, I don't have one handy to test it on. Thought if anyone knew off hand it would cure my curiosity. I'm just wondering if later on if the Nvidia driver stabilizes and we re-enable them, if it will cause interfaces to be renumbered or not.

[cciesec2006]

Originally Posted by ChadB

Hopefully a quick question. I have Sun X4200-M2 servers, each with 2 Quad Intel NIC's. If I disable the onboard NVIDIA NIC cards (eth0/eth1), will the interface numbering in regards to SPLAT start from 0 on the Intel cards? Or will it just look like I have eth2 - eth11? Since I had to ship the servers off for my counterparts to assist in setting up, I don't have one handy to test it on. Thought if anyone knew off hand it would cure my curiosity. I'm just wondering if later on if the Nvidia driver stabilizes and we re-enable them, if it will cause interfaces to be renumbered or not.

I can help you with this. You have to disable Nvidia NIC cards in BIOS PRIOR
to installing SPLAT. If you do not, it will screw up your system.

Your other mistake is using Sun X4200-M2 platforms. This platform can only
run SPLAT 2.6 kernel which is extremely UNSTABLE. I've wasted almost
4 months of my life testing this platform and it was a disaster. IBM servers
are the best to run SPLAT, IMHO, because it can support both SPLAT 2.4
and 2.6 kernel. Once SPLAT 2.6 kernel is stable enough, you can also
install it on IBM servers as well.

My 2c,

[ChadB]

Originally Posted by cciesec2006

I can help you with this. You have to disable Nvidia NIC cards in BIOS PRIOR
to installing SPLAT. If you do not, it will screw up your system.

Your other mistake is using Sun X4200-M2 platforms. This platform can only
run SPLAT 2.6 kernel which is extremely UNSTABLE. I've wasted almost
4 months of my life testing this platform and it was a disaster. IBM servers
are the best to run SPLAT, IMHO, because it can support both SPLAT 2.4
and 2.6 kernel. Once SPLAT 2.6 kernel is stable enough, you can also
install it on IBM servers as well.

My 2c,

I think my stomach will sink now! I originally had wanted just the x4200 but our server folks said they weren't available and we had to buy M2. So that is what was ordered. I pray we have better results. I will have the NVIDIA cards disabled and first install SPLAT. Do you know what happens later on with the interface numbering if the NVIDIA cards are re-enabled (either on purpose or accident)? Will it screw up the existing numbering?

[cciesec2006]

Originally Posted by ChadB

I think my stomach will sink now! I originally had wanted just the x4200 but our server folks said they weren't available and we had to buy M2. So that is what was ordered. I pray we have better results. I will have the NVIDIA cards disabled and first install SPLAT. Do you know what happens later on with the interface numbering if the NVIDIA cards are re-enabled (either on purpose or accident)? Will it screw up the existing numbering?

I can NOT answer that question for you because I did NOT try
re-enabling the Nvidia NIC. But that being said, it is NOT that easy re-enabling
the Nvidia NIC because there are about 5 different screens in the BIOS that
you have to get to in order to enable/disable the Nvidia NICs. Therefore,
I would not worrry about it if I were you.

[dys152]

We have a number of X4200 M2's running 2.6 SPLAT with the Sun (ie Intel) quad PCI Express cards. We experienced quite bad instability with random reboots, took us a while to figure out they were occuring when using NFS across the firewall. However since patching with the RPC hotfix mentioned in sk3556 we have had no problems at all. As mentioned though, disable the onboard Nvidia cards prior to install :)

[Izzio]

back to the original question: Disabling the on board cards eth0 & eth1 will be assigned surely to a quad card and adding or removing interfaces by splat could cause an interface renumbering.

Ciao
Maurizio