Networking Randomly Drops on PowerEdge 2950

[Tech Outfit]

I have a PowerEdge 2950 with FreeNAS 9.2 running via USB stick. I've been having problems with the networking dropping out which then requires a reboot to come back up. I am able to get into the console of the server and can ping nothing but the internal IP addresses on its subnet until I reboot. Originally I thought it was an issue with my LAGG configuration so I deleted the LAGG and configured only a single NIC. I do notice the following error message in my logs about 30 minutes before losing connectivity:

kernel: bce0: bce_pulse(): Warning: bootcode thinks driver is absent!

I am using the onboard Broadcom NICs with nothing special configured that I'm aware of. Can anybody give me an idea of where I can start troubleshooting this issue?

 

[cyberjock]

Yes, try an Intel NIC first. There's a reason why we stress it so much!

 

[Tech Outfit]

Thanks for the quick reply! I'll give that a shot.

I didn't see anything obvious in the hardware recommendations in the wiki (http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations), is this stressed publicly or just in the forums? I thought I had picked hardware that was fairly well supported for FreeBSD but maybe that's not the case.

 

[cyberjock]

Mostly in the forums. It's tribal knowledge for FreeBSD users. It's not a hardware requirement per se, but it does seem to fix weird network problems like yours more often than not.

If you look at the network section it does mention Intel as the best to use.