Anyone out there ever attempted to use Sun Quad Fast Ethernet (QFE)
cards in Checkpoint Secure Platform boxen? If so I'd like to compare notes.

The Secure Platform Linux distribution does include a driver (sunhme),
and the cards are detected by the installer, but attempting to use the
interfaces yields anomalous behavior to say the least.

I'm hoping I can save a few $K by re-using QFE cards instead of buying
Intel quad cards (known to work). I suspect the QFE driver is b0rked,
but QFEs don't have physical MAC addresses and maybe I'm not passing MAC
addresses to the driver early enough in the boot process.

TIA

Triffid

Triffid wrote:

> Anyone out there ever attempted to use Sun Quad Fast Ethernet (QFE)
> cards in Checkpoint Secure Platform boxen? If so I'd like to compare notes.
>
> The Secure Platform Linux distribution does include a driver (sunhme),
> and the cards are detected by the installer, but attempting to use the
> interfaces yields anomalous behavior to say the least.
>
> I'm hoping I can save a few $K by re-using QFE cards instead of buying
> Intel quad cards (known to work). I suspect the QFE driver is b0rked,
> but QFEs don't have physical MAC addresses and maybe I'm not passing MAC
> addresses to the driver early enough in the boot process.
>
> TIA
>
> Triffid

Never mind, it's the driver.

I swapped in a smarter switch, one that could tell me where the MAC
addresses are. It saw the MAC I assigned to eth1 on the port connected
to eth5. Juggled some cables, found I can pass traffic on eth5 - but the
source IP belongs to eth1. eth1 is the first port on the first QFE card,
eth5 is the first port on the second QFE card.

It would seem the driver can only handle one QFE per box - it appears to
be behaving much more reasonably since I removed the second QFE.

Triffid

In article <3fSef.3014$w84.535674 [at] news20.bellglobal.com>,
Triffid <triffid [at] nebula.net> wrote:
>Anyone out there ever attempted to use Sun Quad Fast Ethernet (QFE)
>cards in Checkpoint Secure Platform boxen? If so I'd like to compare notes.

i had qfe-cards in use, but on nativ solari-os, not Secure Platform.
no problem with it.

>The Secure Platform Linux distribution does include a driver (sunhme),
>and the cards are detected by the installer, but attempting to use the
>interfaces yields anomalous behavior to say the least.

imho, qfe is not the same as hme.

best regards
hans

--

hans m42 wrote:

> In article <3fSef.3014$w84.535674 [at] news20.bellglobal.com>,
> Triffid <triffid [at] nebula.net> wrote:
>
>>Anyone out there ever attempted to use Sun Quad Fast Ethernet (QFE)
>>cards in Checkpoint Secure Platform boxen? If so I'd like to compare notes.
>
>
> i had qfe-cards in use, but on nativ solari-os, not Secure Platform.
> no problem with it.

Yes, QFEs play very nicely in Sun boxes running Sun drivers.

>>The Secure Platform Linux distribution does include a driver (sunhme),
>>and the cards are detected by the installer, but attempting to use the
>>interfaces yields anomalous behavior to say the least.
>
>
> imho, qfe is not the same as hme.

Close enough that the Linux driver claims to support both, but it gets
very confused when there's more than one QFE - see my followup.

Thanks for your input.

Triffid