Ok, so I have the dell t620 and a desktop pc. Trying to setup a san via 10gb fiber with an nc522 in the server (logic 3200) connected to the switch via a Cisco dac cable and a fiber link from the nc533 card in the pc.
Initially this seemed to work with dedicated ip addresses and the switch was lit up correctly but the pc seemed to kick the card into power saving and dropped the link. Once I disabled the power saving, the link stayed up from the pc.
However, the link over the dac seemed flaky and the port on the switch was showing no link. It seems to be intermittently up and down.
Cutting out the switch and connecting directly makes no difference either.
It did ping successfully once but now it just doesn’t seem to light up the port.
I’m running electric eel on the server and firstly was wondering if driver support for the qlogic 3200 chipset had been pulled?
I tried also with a solar 7120 but the server wouldn’t even boot (halted in the bios with a pcie error), though I’m replacing that card to re-test.
If the NIC is showing up in your GUI Networking window, it should be getting a driver. One item to watch out for is vendor locked SFP+ modules required. I don’t know if your switch or NICs are vendor locked.
The mad thing is that it did connect once and ping successfully from the PC to the server so I would’ve thought the trancievers were working ok. Plus I tried with the cisco DAC to the switch and also the Tranciever (got to check the brand) and both failed…
Just checking now and the link appears up from the server to the switch plus from the switch to the PC.
I’ve another solarflare on its way so I might try first of all swapping the nics between the two machines and then try the 7120 in the PC with the 523 in the server…
Is everything on private IP ranges? Can you try posting screenshots of your network setup from the GUI? No response seems more like an IP related issue than connection or hardware, if you see links up?
Looking at it I set the 10GB fiber from the PC to DHCP mode and spliced the SAN switch into the router.
The PC got an IP address immediately and can ping both internal and externally.
So, looking like the driver or setup of the NC522 card in the server is giving an issue. I can’t seemingly set its interface to DHCP as a test (Only 1 interface allowed to be DHCP and that’s the primary 1GB link everything else uses to connect) so no joy there.
The 2.5GB connectivity I was using through the switch seems to be running fine with no problems and the SAN is accessable, but Of course I need to swap over to the 10GB for proper speedy access to the drive trays (iscsi etc…)
Hmm.
Might have to swap the cards over and about it seems, or find a more compatible one for a Dell/Cisco DAC/TRuenas combo… might scoop up ax x520 from somewhere… (or a pair)…
Only one DHCP interface is allowed. You need the second on a different subnet.
Screenshot from Core. This is how I have mine set. ix is an Intel X520 directly connected to another Intel X520 on a Windows machine. Both get static addresses.
1Gbps network is conventional router and modem, using DHCP
The intel card are vendor locked. You can bypass it on that series or just get SFP+ modules coded ‘Intel’ I got mine from 10GTek store on Amazon. FS.com is another recommendation I have seen.
Upon boot up, you see mesages stating ‘unsupported_sfp’ or something like that. I was able to bypass on TrueNAS Core / FreeBSD but not on my Windows machine and had to get different transceivers.
using 192.168.0.x for all the dhcp based and the SAN is using 192.168.101.x with static IP addresses (192.168.101.1 and 192.168.101.3) for the two cards. (the secondary ports are set to use the 102 subnet…).
The current SAN is set through the same switch with cat6 2.5gb and static ip’s on the 100 subnet. I was planning just to swap over the IP address of the iscsi initiator etc to the new subnet once I had confirmed the cards were connecting ok.
argh… got a 10GTEK x520 single port card, shoved it into the server and lo and behold… The server fails to start properly, getting stuck when re-indexing the server hardware… the bar gets about 80% across the screen then it hangs…
so… The HP nc522 worked briefly, the solarflare 7120 wont start up in the server, the x520-DA1 wont get past the server hardware cataloging stage and I’m banging my head on a wall it seems.
The intel based card should be compatible with a dell t620 according to Dell themselves, just not working somehow…
dont know what to do. put the nc522 back in and await some intel trancievers?
Put the x520 in the PC with the Intel bits and bobs, then move the nc523 into the server with the trancievers that seem to work in the PC?
I’ve shuffled the x520 card into a different x8 slot in the server and fired it up. The server immediately gave issues with the lifecycle controller complaining and then stated for some reason that the sas cables for the backplane were the wrong way round. ???.
It took about 5 or 6 restarts then seemingly fired up, got its act together and connected up to the switch…
I reset up the iscsi service, connected to it via the 10g interface and ran a speed test.
The drive tray seems to be giving anywhere from 3 times bulk transfer speed to 30-100 times for random seeks compared to the local 8tb drive in the pc! :). Looking good :).
checked on the server and it was hammering the 2.5GB link and nothing on the 10GB one. faffed about a bit and realised the iscsi targets on the server were in the wrong group. swapped them over and now getting even more speed for the data transfers. In fact, its constantly running at the 1.2Gbps max sata rate from the source drive on the PC whilst its moving the data. testing with crystaldisk, it’s running faster than some of my SSD’s and nvme drives… (though my primary OS drive still monsters everything ).
I’m glad you are getting it sorted out. It took me a bit from ordering a few Intel x520, transceivers and a fiber patch cable to get everything working. A bit of a learning curve
Yep, seemingly it’s firing up and connecting ok. I’ve some fiber and trancievers coming though Dell+Intel+Cisco DAC seems to be working for the moment.
just got to rebuild ollama now that Electric Eel is installed…;)…