THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA" : Evil Things

Broadcom Co-Founder Faces Conspiracy and Drug Charges - NYTimes.com:

bradley — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:17:00 GMT

Broadcom Co-Founder Faces Conspiracy and Drug Charges - NYTimes.com:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Broadcom-Indictment.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

I've always said that Broadcom nics are evil... apparently the CoFounder is/was as well? Can he/they run an ethical company when they are obviously WAY too busy doing other things?

Oh yeah and while we're on the topic of technical stuff.....The error "Stop 0x0000007E" occurs when you try to shut down a Windows Server 2003 based computer with a Broadcom NIC installed but disabled:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=953794

Having Network Problems on Win2003 SP2?

bradley — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 07:47:00 GMT

Cheshire's Blog : Having Network Problems on Win2003 SP2?:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jamesche/archive/2007/12/19/having-network-problems-on-win2003-sp2.aspx

Translation... run the sbsbpa (see www.sbsbpa.com ) and disable the settings noted in that best practice analyzer that talks about TOE and all that and ensure that you've installed the latest drivers for your network cards. The best way to successfully deploy Windows 2003 sp2 is to up those network cards. While Broadcom nics have been troublesome, so too have been Intels per reports if they are not on the latest and greatest drivers from the manufacturers.

TOE by default not enabled

bradley — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:09:00 GMT

Nick considers TOE or Tcp/ip offload enablement to be evil due to his issues with Broadcom nics, but here's a funny thing I found while surfing the Dell web site.. by DEFAULT they ship their machines with the Offload engine disabled.

When we flatten the boxes and reinstall, my guess is that TOE is being enabled on those nic cards with the driver install and we don't realize that Dell is shipping these with the TOE turned off:

Therefore it sounds like by default they do this:

To disable checksum offloading:

From the registry you can do:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

Type DisableTaskOffload as the entry name, and then press ENTER.

Right-click DisableTaskOffload, and then click Modify.

In the Value data box, type a value of 1 , and then click OK.

These days I think we might also considering doing this as well:

Disable RSS (Receive side scaling)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912222/en-us

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit , and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, and then type EnableRSS .
4. Double-click EnableRSS, type 0 , and then click OK.

The Following network cards are evil

bradley — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:01:00 GMT

Now normally I don't like to be quite so ... well...non complementary about a product ...especially when I personally haven't suffered from the issues surrounding it. But lately so much weirdness has occurred with one brand of network cards that we've begun to label them as downright Evil.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2006/11/10/Broadcom-Nic-issues.aspx#469535

A comment, and a SRX case that had to be opened to get to the bottom of the issue pointed out again how, right now, at all costs, Broadcom nics should be avoided. Once again, they nailed an SBSer who was trying to install R2 and the WSUS install just wouldn't.

Buy/scrounge some Intel nics, disable the Broadcoms on the motherboard if that's where they are at and hopefully at some point in time the Broadcoms will straighten out.

But for right now... avoid them like the plague.

Now in all fairness, Darrin got it working by installing the management software and only installing the drivers, which.. even my Intel wireless nics like/want to load up wireless managent software that freaks things out . So perhaps that should be "Avoid all management software like the plague" to be fair.

P.S. D-links are reported by some to have evil tendencies as well.

Under the unofficial blogger code of ethics - no vendor has paid for this endorsement of Intel nics...they just have always been rock solid. It's called "been there, done that, they work". And I started a new category for the blog.... called "Evil Things".