Archive for March, 2010

Debian, Dell servers and the Broadcom NetXtreme II firmware

Posted in Linux, Work work on 03/19/2010 10:44 am by emilkrueper

In case you are running Debian Lenny on one or another Dell PowerEdge server or a bunch of servers from the R series (like the R410), there might occur a problem with the firmware of the Broadcom NetXtreme II network interface cards when your are updating the kernel from the official repositories. The warning message is like:

“W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/bnx2-09-4.0.5.fw for module bnx2”

In that case you can easily fix the problem with adding the non-free repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb https://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib

and then run

aptitude update && aptitude install firmware-bnx2

This will install the required firmware and rebuild your kernel initrd and include the firmware at boot time.