SOLVED Link UP/DOWN - bad hardware?

[SilverJS]

All,

My main rig has started throwing these continuous Link Up -> Link Down -> Link Up messages, like one every 5 seconds, within the last day or two. My searches so far seem to indicate this is likely a hardware problem.

Things I've tried : a reboot, a hard power-down, trying another Cat5 cable that was known to work (far as I could tell before, anyway), trying another port on the switch, and also rolling back to a previous version of FreeNAS via the Boot menu. I've also tried to reconfigure interfaces (using igb1 instead of igb0), but nothing worked - but that part of the episode mainly served to show me I don't know that much about how two NIC's on one board operate. =)

I do have a spare NC360T lying around. My understanding is, if it is indeed hardware-related, I'd just have to go in the BIOS to disable the motherboard's NIC's, plop the NC360T in, configure interface again, and I'd be off to the races - am I correct?

Please confirm for me this is the logical next step? Or is there some other diagnosis I've missed?

Cheers!

 

[BigDave]

I do have a spare NC360T lying around. My understanding is, if it is indeed hardware-related, I'd just have to go in the BIOS to disable the motherboard's NIC's, plop the NC360T in, configure interface again, and I'd be off to the races - am I correct?

Yes!
AFAIK you would not even have to disable the onboard ethernet, just reboot after installing the expansion card and reconfigure the interface.

 

[SilverJS]

Just an update on this - I realized that when I was doing the cable part of my diagnostic, I was actually doing it on the wrong machine!! =) LOL - both my rigs are in very similar-looking enclosures, right next to one another. So, when I was testing whether the cables were working, I was actually pulling cables off of my backups machine. =)

But anyway - this led me to re-do the test, on the correct machine - and, it seemed that EVERY cable was defective! After two, I thought the odds were very, very slim - but after the fourth, I thought - "There's no way". So I started suspecting my switch. As soon as I used another port on the switch, everything worked fine! So, it was actually port 6 on my switch that was defective. Seeing as all ports were full, I basically am doing without the IPMI for my backups box right now, but everything else is working. I'll get myself a new switch soon.

Cheers!

 

[BigDave]

I realized that when I was doing the cable part of my diagnostic, I was actually doing it on the wrong machine!! =) LOL