[SOLVED] After upgrade from 5.6, something keeps setting speed to 1000 on e1000 NICs

[dgeist]

I upgraded my 5.6 vm cluster server (Asus quiet SOHO model with 2 e1000 NICs, SATA disk, intel multi-core processor) and something keeps setting my NICs to gigabit (1000Mb/s). I have ETHTOOL_OPS defined in the boot files for 100Mb/s-full no autoneg and it does boot up that way. Both interfaces on on a dumb 100Mb switch on different logical subnets but in the same broadcast domain. This setup worked perfectly under CentOS 5.6.

After some time (much faster if I generate a lot of network traffic), something sets the interface speed to gig on one or both ports and I get a kernel module dump to console with error messaging from the network watchdog process.

If I try to restart the network interfaces, I get an error about not being able to set interface speed while there are "Sol/IDER sessions" active (serial over LAN? ).

I've disabled the remote serial console support in the BIOS and I've removed the openIPMI package. What else could be trying to initiate Sol/IDER traffic? Is it possible that another host on the segment is doing it and this one is just getting hit by them? Can I disable that feature in the e1000 driver?

Thanks in advance.
Dan

[pschaff]

Welcome to the CentOS fora. Please see the recommended reading for new users linked in my signature.

You might try the [url=http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-e1000]ELRepo kmod-e1000[/url] (or e1000e if appropriate) module. See [url=http://elrepo.org/tiki/FAQ]FAQ #4[/url] to verify compatibility with your hardware.

[dgeist]

Indeed, the ElRepo kmod-e1000e driver seems to have done the trick. It's been up solid for an hour and responding on the network without complaint. I was about to try the intel driver after getting the exact chipset from the manufacturer's site and googling for issues between it and RHEL 6 (and lo and behold, there were a lot).

Thanks for the response and glad to have it fixed.

Dan

[pschaff]

Chalk up another win for ELRepo! :-)
Thanks for reporting back. Marking this thread [SOLVED] for posterity.