ARP pb. w/ 3C905, InCom v1.60 bootPROM

[Petri Makijarvi]

Hello,

I have used InCom's (now Bootix) 3C90x v1.60 bootPROMs on a 10 Mbit/s Ethernet,
both
end having 3C905-TX 10BaseT cards. The server is running DHCP on a SuSE Linux
6.1 installation, Dell 2300 PowerEdge servers.

Now I have updgared my nodes to 100 Mbit/s, switching Ethernet and I can not
boot
network booting nodes anymore. At first everything works fine, but the TFTP
downloading then soon stops
and I get errors M11 (ARP time-out) and M30 (can't ARP tftp address) from the
bootPROM.

The Linux kernel's ARP cache
dump (arp -v) recognizes the client host but says "incomplete hardware
address". I am using the
latest 2.2.10 kernel on the server, but the behavior is the same with older
kernels as well. Otherwise the ARP works fine with other machines, Linux or
Unix boxes.

Is there a way to find out what actually goes wrong, an error log or something
? Is there an arp-daemon still available for 2.2.x kernels ?Any tip to get me
out of this trouble would we highly appreciated; I wouldn't like to face the
network guys asking them to downgrade me back to 10 Mbit/s :)

Thanks,

Petri

--
Petri Makijarvi - European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
mailto:petri@esrf.fr (HTML OK) http://www.esrf.fr/computing/cs/sysadmin/rtk/
tel: +33-(0)4.76.88.22.50 fax: +33-(0)4.76.88.20.20
E.S.R.F.  B.P 220 F-38043 Grenoble Cedex   France