[Beowulf] HP 10 GbE card use/warranty

[Steve Cousins]

I have a couple of 10 GbE cards from HP (NC510F, NetXen/QLogic) and I have 
been trying to get them to work in non-HP Linux systems. After failing to 
be able to comile/install the nx_nic drivers on Fedora 9 and 12 (it checks 
to see if kernel >= 2.6.27 and if so looks for net/8021q/vlan.h but can't 
find it) I installed one of the supported distributions (or close enough): 
CentOS 5. Driver installation went fine and I was able to get one of the 
cards to work. The other one seems to be bad. The nx_nic driver loads but 
no eth2 device shows up. Also, the Activity LED is constant but no Link 
LED lights up. Since I can't get the eth device loaded I can't update the 
firmware.

So, I have one good one and one bad one. Pretty clear-cut. I've tried to 
get technical support from HP to RMA it and I end up in no-mans land. It 
seems that they do not have support for peripherals like this. They 
consider this part of a system and the only systems they seem to think 
these go in are their Proliant servers so I end up at Proliant tech 
support. But I have no serial number for a Proliant server so it is a dead 
end.

I tried "Customer Satisfaction" and got none.

They insist that these cards are *only* for HP Proliant servers but I have 
not seen any indication of this at the sites I go to to buy this type of 
card. I bought this from a reseller when we bought a bunch of Procurve 
equipment with some 10 GbE modules for a switch. The reseller is seeing 
what he can do but in the mean time I thought I'd check here to see if 
anyone has run into this sort of thing from HP. I've always had good luck 
with HP but it has mainly been from the Procurve section and they won't 
touch this either.

Anyone running HP cards in non-HP equipment? Any tips on getting an RMA 
for this? I'm thinking of trying to track down an HP server on campus to 
work with just to get the RMA but I doubt if there are too many of these 
that aren't in use and still under warranty.

Thanks,

Steve
______________________________________________________________________
  Steve Cousins - Supercomputer Engineer/Administrator - Univ of Maine
  Marine Sciences, 452 Aubert Hall       Target Tech, 20 Godfrey Drive
  Orono, ME 04469    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~     Orono, ME 04473
  (207) 581-4302     ~ cousins at umit.maine.edu ~      (207) 866-6552