bce(4) on the Dell PE 2950

[Mark Felder]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013, at 17:56, Vladislav V. Prodan wrote:
> 17.10.2013 20:15, Sean Bruno wrote:
> > On Thu, 2013-10-17 at 08:59 +0300, Vladislav V. Prodan wrote:
> >> I have a DELL PowerEdge 2950 server (3rd generation). There is a
> >> network
> >> card with chipset bce BCM5708.
> >>
> >> If a ready algorithm for getting rid of interface resetting / watchdog
> >> timeout?
> >>
> >> Thanks. 
> > 
> > In the freebsd.org cluster we run several of these machines.  We had to
> > update the f/w on them (broadcom) to make the errors go away.
> > 
> 
> Hello
> 
> Share instructions for updating the network card firmware?
> Thank you.
> 

I imagine you should either boot off a Dell OMSA live CD and apply the
patches (they're Linux binaries) or build a firmware update disc that
automatically applies all firmware updates. The latter requires a
specific Dell application that runs on Windows I believe.. maybe OSX?

There may be a third option -- if you have the Enterprise DRAC in your
system you can boot into a firmware update mode that pulls the patches
directly from ftp.dell.com and applies them. However, I can't recall if
this mode exists in 2950 IIIs.