ali aboos

If you have a Dell server, dump it, or keep reading 😉

Well… to me it sounds like some copyright crap Broadcom is pulling, or perhaps Debian is trying to be more compliant with restricted drivers. Three ways I can think of to work around this:

Download the deb package from http://packages.debian.org/etch/firmware-bnx2″ href=”http://packages.debian.org/etch/firmware-bnx2″>http://packages.debian.org/etch/firmware-bnx2, copy it to a flash drive and insert when prompted during installation. You don’t have to mount anything… install process will automatically find and load the driver. Do not unpack the .deb package, copy it to your USB drive without any modifications. OS will access the file and extract what it needs accordingly.
Install an old or supported NIC (Intel?) and proceed with installation. Once it’s done install the deb package and restart networking.
Install without a NIC, then download and copy the file to a flash drive or CD, mount and install. Just make sure you’re not using Debian NetInst CD!

One of the readers suggested that I should also post a link to the page where different versions of the driver can be downloaded http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&keywords=bnx2.

Updated Feb 18th 2010  by Mark (comment reply):

To the people struggling with BCM5716: Even the latest Lenny 5.0.4 stable installer (with kernel 2.6.26-2 rev 21lenny3) doesn’t yet have the PCI IDs required to load the drivers. Here is some useful info:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565353″ href=”http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565353″>http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565353
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-kernel@lists.debian.org/msg52571.html” href=”http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-kernel@lists.debian.org/msg52571.html”>http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-kernel@lists.debian.org/msg52571.html
http://wiki.debian.org/HowToRebuildAnOfficialDebianKernelPackage” href=”http://wiki.debian.org/HowToRebuildAnOfficialDebianKernelPackage”>http://wiki.debian.org/HowToRebuildAnOfficialDebianKernelPackage

I’ve just spent the last 2 days working out how to roll my own Debian installer image with a patched kernel. All this work just to get some tiny changes into bnx2.ko and preseed the firmware 🙂

I’ve uploaded working Debian Lenny netinstall images:

MegaUpload Links:
amd64: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8O5D782S” href=”http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8O5D782S”>http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8O5D782S
i386: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3B9W1MHP” href=”http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3B9W1MHP”>http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3B9W1MHP

RapidShare Links:
amd64: http://rapidshare.com/files/359005652/debian-lenny-5.04-netinst-amd64-bcm5716.tar.bz2.html
i386: http://rapidshare.com/files/359005127/debian-lenny-5.04-netinst-i386-bcm5716.tar.bz2.html

Note: For anybody just looking for an install image containing the bnx2 firmware, this is for you too. Well, it works for me – YMMV.

btw, the next point release (5.0.5) of Lenny will work without any of these problems.”

It’s pretty easy to upgrade your Etch to Lenny. Open your repo list and replace all references to “etch” with “lenny”. To edit your sources.list:
nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Then update your repositories:
aptitude update

and proceed to upgrade:
aptitude dist-upgrade

I ran into an error when I was updating my repositories: “There is no public key available for the following key IDs: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”. To fix that error:
gpg --recv-key --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
gpg --export xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | apt-key add -
Replace xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with the key you see in the error message and run aptitude update again.

http://www.debian.com/News/2009/20090214

Happy Valentine’s day!

NIC info is stored in the following file (Etch):
/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

Edit to fit your needs!

For Lenny just look at /etc/udev/rules.d/ and find the file with presistent-net.rules in filename.

To install VMware Server 1.x:

Install the following packages if you don’t already have them:
aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) openssl libssl-dev psmisc
Untar the package, navigate to vmware-server-distrib directory and type
./vmware-install.pl
To install VMware Tools:

The following packages are needed in order to install VMware Tools:
aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Open VMware Server Console and Click VM – Install VMware Tools. Then go to your guest Debain VM and mount the CD:
mount /dev/cdrom
I usually copy tar files to the hard drive and extract:
cp /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz /root

cd /root/
tar -zxf VMwareTools-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz
If you want to directly untar it to another directory:
tar -zxf /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz -C <directory>
Navigate to vmware-tools-distrib and execute the install command:
./vmware-install.pl
Follow directions and you should be able to install VMware Tools without incident.

Note: If you are running an early release of Debian Etch you may be asked to provide path to C compiler directory. That means you do not have a compiler installed and will have to install the following two packages:
aptitude install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4