Thursday, November 26, 2009

Dell NICs still causing problems with incomplete arps

I ran into the same problem again, this time with a BCM 5708 NIC on a Dell 2RU Poweredge 2950. Exactly the same symptoms: the box makes ARPs, which are answered, but the arp cache shows incomplete entries for all IP addresses. Setting the entries manually didn't help - my pings then just seemed to go nowhere. iptables was not getting in the way. There appears to be some discussion about the problem but no solutions...

My setup was a bridged interface that consisted of two bonded NICs to get more bandwith throughput using Cisco port channelling on the switch. Getting rid of the bond and just using a regular bridge on one of the NICs fixed it. Might try the NIC bonding again on the next hardware refresh.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Creating an audio CD from mp3 files on linux

K3b is great for this, you can just start an audio project and drag mp3 files onto it. On ubuntu karmic you will need these packages:

k3b and libk3b6-extracodecs