I've installed OpenBSD 3.8 on an IBM HS20 blade (model 8678).
Everything generally works OK (even multiprocessor support!), except for
some weirdness with the network interface, which is the onboard Broadcom
BCM57xx (bge) interface. The kernel does correctly enumerate and bring
up the network interfaces, but after that point, I start having trouble.
What usually happens is that I can't get to the host from machines on
the local network. When I ssh or ping from hosts *outside* of the local
network (and therefore the traffic comes from a gateway address), then I
can ping or ssh the OpenBSD box just fine.
From the OpenBSD blade, I can successfully ping or ssh to any host,
both on the local network and outside of it.
What's interesting is that this is a problem only after the OpenBSD
machine has run for a few minutes. Right after a reboot, hosts on the
local network can ping or ssh to the OpenBSD box, but eventually, that
ability goes away.
I'm pretty sure that this weirdness is ARP related. When I look at the
ARP table on some of the machines that I try to ping and ssh from, the
MAC address is always "(incomplete)" for the OpenBSD box. Which
explains why the connection never gets made. But then again, when I go
to the Cisco Catalyst which is my gateway and do a "sh arp", it has the
correct MAC address for the OpenBSD box. When I look at the ARP table
on the OpenBSD box, it has MAC addresses associated with some of my
network infrastructure (both the gateway address and the address of
another router), as well as any other host on the network I've pinged or
connected to.
It's as if the OpenBSD machine just quits responding to ARP requests
from other machines after a while. What could cause this? I've looked
at /var/log/messages and the like, but I don't see any errors.
Is there anything dumb that I'm missing?
PF is turned off (with pfctl -d). Would pf even affect ARP?
What else would help? Should I include the output of something or my
network configs?
-Sean
