Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

An article on Debian Administration got my attention today, since it listed something my colleague just showed to me the other day. Often, when debugging network issues, you call up some support guy and he wants to know which switch ports your NIC is using. Often, you're in the office and the server is in a distant data center. So getting to the cables is next impossible or very time-consuming at the very least. And often, documentation is not trusted because you are having problems to begin with. Using CDPR or the less brand-specific lldpd can become a god-sent tool. It allows you to monitor Cisco Discovery Protocol packets from the command line and tell the network admin exactly what he needs to know. :) Solaris admins have snoop to make use of. Linux guys can also use tcpdump: tcpdump -nn -v -i -s 1500 -c 1 ‘ether[20:2] == 0×2000’

Just as a pointer for everyone looking to do the same, here is an article on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list about VLAN tagging on Red Hat Linux . It should also work for Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). The main tip was not to setup IP addressing for the native interface (eth2 in the example), but to add it for the sub interfaces eth2.vlan1 and the2.vlan2 instead.

As we'll be using teaming of network cards (NICs) in Windows and Linux, I was searching for a manual for teaming (Word file) of the Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet cards. At the same time, I'm including a link to the Broadcom Driver FAQ ...

I've been working on the Linux servers the last couple of days and while the Intel PRO/1000 PT quad port server adapter works fine with Intel's lastest drivers and the on-board dual port Broadcom NetExtreme II was detected properly by Oracle Enterprise Linux (version 4.4 at this time), I still have some problems with network trunking and VLANs in Linux . A colleague found a brilliant start-up script that simply processes the /etc/sysconfig/networking directory and starts your interfaces in the proper order and activates VLANs prior to bringing up the interface (eth0, eth1, etc), using the vconfig command. Oh one note: you may have to activate the 802.1q trunking kernel module using 'modprobe 8021q' or it won't work. I had to...