Broadcom onboard NIC not being recognised.

[BlackCircle]

I'm tring to set up a firewall using Red Hat 7.2 and a Dell GX280 Pc but the installation process is not recognising the onboard Intel broadcom NIC.

Is there a manual way to add a device driver for it ?

[bigtomrodney]

If I remember correctly the onboard broadcom in a GX280 is a gigabit NIC, which is not supported in such an early version of Red Hat. I think it is fixed in RedHat 9, and is certainly fixed in more modern releases like Red Hat AS or Fedora. This network card was shipped with drivers for everything from Solaris to BSD to Linux. Check out the install packages on your Dell CDs, it was definitely included but inside a win32 self extractor on the disc.

[BlackCircle]

Cheers mate. Your correct the onboard NIS is certainly gigabit.

I downloaded the latest source from the Broadcom website and built the driver on my main 2.4.7-10 kernel box. No drama, so I thought.

I then headed out to the client's site and copied the driver on to the Dell firewall unit and tried to insmod the driver. To my surprise I was bombarded with unresolved external messages. WTF I thought to myself !

*Sigh* Looking more closely at the Kernel version on the Dell firewall box I soon discovered that it was a 2.4.9cp Checkpoint Secure Platform modified kernel. *Grumble grumble grumble* No chance of building the driver to run on this kernel.

Thanks for your input in any case.

[borromini]

Any chance of migrating to a 2.6.x kernel? Maybe that one contains the driver by default. Then you won't have all the trouble (if you succeed in migrating from 2.4 to 2.6).

[bigtomrodney]

What are the issues with building the module on that kernel - is it a software issue or because you could not run this kind of operation on your Client's server? I'm not familiar with this kernel, so I'm wondering if it was one you could run on your own machine to build the module and then bring across, or is the fact that it's a secure kernel and modules can't run on it?

[BlackCircle]

Unfortunately 2.6.x is not an option either. I had little choice but to refer it back to the distributor.

Basicaly there is no Kernel source code (not even header files) on the machine or on the distribution CD-ROM. This is a cut down kernel modified by Checkpoint and distributed as a remotely administered network access policy enforcement point.

Thanks again for all your help ladz, but I'm just gunna have to follow this one up with the vendor.