mercredi 16 février 2011

Dell PowerEdge 2950 and Debian GNU/Linux 2.6.32 from Squeeze

The current stable distribution of Debian GNU/Linux version 6.0.0, codenamed squeeze is wrongly reported as without the support of the Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet on Dell PowerEdge 2950.

It is possible to load non-free firmware from official repository and make the Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet works.

It is necessary to activate the non-free repository or as you don't have network yet to use a usb stick or a cdrom:

From http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/ grab :
- http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-bnx2_0.28_all.deb
- http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-bnx2x_0.28_all.deb
- http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-linux-nonfree_0.28_all.deb

- http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-linux_0.28_all.deb

And then install them using dpkg -i in that order. After a reboot the network card can be found with the bnx2i directory as shown with dmesg :


[ 28.794064] bnx2 0000:07:00.0: irq 33 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 28.908007] bnx2: eth0: using MSI
[ 28.908209] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
[ 30.619141] bnx2: eth0 NIC Copper Link is Up, 100 Mbps full duplex, receive & transmit flow control ON
[ 30.619320] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[



CD-Roms and Usb sticks can be found under sdX and srX in the dev directory so survivals commands are :

source /etc/bash_completion
mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom
dpkg -i ./firmware-bnx2_0.28_all.deb ./firmware-bnx2x_0.28_all.deb ./firmware-linux-nonfree_0.28_all.deb ./firmware-linux_0.28_all.deb
modprobe bnx2i
dmesg
reboot


Happy install !