A quick jumpstart of a Dell R210 turned out to be a little bit of a problem. Dell uses Broadcom Netextreme II cards in these systems. They do netboot fine, but when booting a netinstall of Debian, the installer doesn’t find the network cards.

The problem turned out to be two fold. The first part was the firmware that is required for these cards to work. It is no longer included in the Debian installer as the package has been moved to non-free. But there is plenty to find about this on the net, and it is an easy fix. Just update the initrd image with the non-free firmware package.

http://www.ducea.com/2009/05/19/debian-lenny-501-pxe-initrd-update/

But then the network cards are still not detected. The card has a PCI id of 14e4:163b, but the driver only recognises card with PCI id 14e4:163a. Ofcourse you can recompile the kernel to fix this, but there is also a quick and easy fix:

http://blog.akkaya.de/jpabel/2010/01/22/NetXtreme-II-BCM5716-on-Ubuntu-8-04

I didn’t use the complete install hook here, just ran the patch on the bnx2.ko kernel module before generating the new initrd image for the netboot. Quite simple:

#!/bin/sh sed -i 's/pci:v000014E4d0000163A/pci:v000014E4d0000163B/' bnx2.ko sed -i 's/xe4x14x00x00x3ax16x00x00/xe4x14x00x00x3bx16x00x00/' bnx2.ko

As the systems needed to run OpenVZ, I used the same patch on the Debian supplied OpenVZ kernel, works like a charm.