Detect network hardware causes iDRAC to disconnect

Hi,

It may have to do with it resetting the NICs during the discovery phase. If you use the dedicated port does it do the same thing? You may want to update the firmware as well. http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=0F12K&fileId=3470464256&osCode=RH60&productCode=poweredge-r610&languageCode=EN&categoryId=ES

Hi Josh,

Thanks for the quick response.

I updated iDRAC to 1.99 but the problem still persists.

If you use the dedicated port does it do the same thing?

I haven't tried this but I wish to use the shared option.

Should I update the firmware of the network device too?

Thanks,
Jesin

It wouldn’t hurt to try it. When the idrac stops responding how long have you waited? The idrac may need to reboot which can take a few minutes.

I didn't notice how long I waited but it must be atleast 10mins.

Also when the server boots via PXE, it gets the same IP which was assigned statically to iDRAC. And this causes iDRAC to disconnect.

10 minutes should be enough for it to reboot. The duplicate IP addresses could be an issue.

I booted from a CentOS live image (via virtual image) and updated Broadcom's firmware but the issue was still present. So i decided to update the BIOS.

I booted from the same CentOS live image (via virtual media), downloaded the BIOS BIN file, executed it, it completed successfully and asked to reboot. I hit 'y'

Now CentOS is stuck here - http://i.imgur.com/YxCOceU.png

But the system hasn't frozen and I can issue a Ctrl-Atl-Del to it. And when I do this the "init: plymouth-shutdown..." line appears and it stops at "init: rc main process killed..."

What do I do now? iDRAC isn't accessible and I'm seeing this output screen via KVM.

will it let you reboot with ctrl-alt-del from that screen?

Can you change the IP so that there isn't an IP conflict with the iDRAC and the PXE? That could be causing things to not communicate properly. 

I had to power cycle the server, luckily nothing bad happened but the BIOS was back to the older version.

Then I mounted the ISO via KVM over IP and was able to successfully update the BIOS. But iDRAC still becomes inaccessible during the "Detect network hardware" step.

Also the iDRAC webpage > Firmware Inventory shows the old Broadcom firmware version. I thought it wasn't updated and ran the .bin file again. But the "Running validation...." step shows the latest  firmware version.

So why is iDRAC still reporting the older version?

I even disabled DHCP for this network but it still didn't work. I came to the conclusion that a dedicated link is required as a normal NIC is under the control of its OS.

Example, executing "ifconfig em1 down" from within the OS shuts down the port including the shared iDRAC.

So got another link from the switch to the dedicated iDRAC port and all is well.

Thanks a lot for the support Josh!