On Thu, 1 Jul 2010, Brian Haley wrote: > On 07/01/2010 08:04 PM, Charlie Brady wrote: > > > > I'm trying to troubleshoot a problem with lost network traffic within a > > cluster. The hardware is HP DL380 with BCM5708 NICs. The only abnormality > > I've spotted is a high number in the ex_filtered_packets statistic. I > > haven't been able to find out what that means. All I see in the driver is > > that it seems to be an alias for stat_IfInFramesL2FilterDiscards in the > > statistics block from the NIC firmware or hardware. > > > > Can anyone tell me what this L2 filter is and when/why it discards frames? > > > > Thanks > > > > [root@vmnode1 ~]# ethtool -S eth1 > > NIC statistics: > <snip> > > rx_filtered_packets: 1172921 > > This is the explanation I got from Broadcom when I saw this: Thanks, that's handy. > "Filtered packets are dropped by the hardware when they don't match the > L2 perfect match filters, mcast hash filters and broadcast filter. > These filters are programmed based on the NIC's MAC address, multicast > list from the stack and broadcast is always enabled." > > Under normal operation I believe the counter will go up... What would cause it to go up in normal operation? > Are you seeing any particular type of packets being dropped? For example, > can you send/receive both IPv4 and IPv6 "pings" on that NIC? I don't know what is being dropped. I do know that cluster heartbeat traffic between the two nodes sometimes stops, leading to cluster failover and fencing. I don't know what is causing the traffic stalls, but NIC driver issues is high on the suspicion list. Platform is CentOS 5, not fully updates - kernel is 2.6.18-128.1.6.el5. The traffic passing between the nodes is unicast IP, broadcast IP and multicast. --- Charlie -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
