On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 12:56:44PM -0400, Jon Hart wrote: > On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 12:10:35PM -0400, Brian A. Seklecki wrote: > > > > The Intel IPMI on the motherboard may be to blame. It's always up/on and > > listening. > > > > Also, see my thread in freebsd-questions@ about Dells with Intel em(4) and > > Dell PowerEdge switches w/ NIC Teaming, 802.3ad, ng_many2_one, etc. > > > > For example, traffic sent from the IPMI IP/MAC of the interface is visible > > from the OS via tcpdump(8), which is kind of spooky. > > This was something I had thought of and I believe I disabled all traces > of it. Console redirection, BMC/IPMI, etc, all disabled. Perhaps > "disabled" simply means "don't accept connections to IPMI but keep the > link up".
This does appear to be the case. BMC is disabled and the card still exhibits the same behavior. > I'll double check this today and verify. Will the IPMI on the > motherboard only work with the onboard ethernet controllers, or will it > get its grubby little hands on any/all controllers it finds? If it only > works with the onboard, then maybe switching to the PCI card ports will > be a sufficient workaround.Z Testing these machines shows that only the primary onboard controller acts dumb. My secondary onboard controller (em5, in this case) works as expected. The only question that remains is... is the fact that 'ifconfig em4 down' put the interface into a "DOWN" state but keeps the link up a bug? I guess em did its best to down the interface, but IPMI brought it back up. I wonder if its worthwhile for the driver to detect this? Anyway, thanks for your insight! -jon
