Hi, I am having a NIC driver problem with pxe kickstart of RHEL3 update 8
on some new hardware (Sun X2100 M2). The vendor documentation indicates that RHEL3 U7 or later has
compatible drivers for this server. When I install RHEL3 U8 from CD, it works
ok. When I attempt a pxe kickstart, it appears that the NIC driver is not
compatible. I get the “no network device in choosenetworkinterface”
message. I have been kickstarting RHEL3U3 for some time (on older hardware), so
I think in general that I have a working pxe kickstart server environment. The NIC is a Broadcom device. The server vendor supplies the Broadcom
drivers, but not in binary form for RHEL3 U8. Based on my limited understanding
of how this works, I would need to build the tg3 driver from source against the
boot kernel (2.4.21-47.ELBOOT) if I want to use the Broadcom NIC for a network
install. Then I would need to add the new driver to the initrd image, or make
it available as a driver disk. When I look inside the initrd image, the tg3.o
driver is definitely not identical to the tg3.o driver from the CD install,
although that doesn’t prove that the tg3 driver available during
kickstart is incompatible with my hardware. Does it seem likely that RHEL3 U8 would contain a compatible driver for
the Broadcom NIC for the 2.4.21-47.EL kernel, but that the driver for the boot
kernel is not compatible? That seemed odd to me, so I thought I would ask the
question before proceeding with building the driver from source, somewhat
unfamiliar territory for me (especially building for boot kernels). Or might
there be another cause to this problem? Thanks, Doug |