Debian Etch to Lenny Migration
At my place of employment, sephone internet solutions, we just finished our debian upgrades. Overall I have huge respect for debian and the apt package tool. Overall the migration from etch to lenny across several servers was easy, except for one back.
One server required the bnx2 firmware for a Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC. For one reason or another, the bnx2 driver was not found after doing a standard debian upgrade. This was quite a problem. After apt finished with what looked like a flawless upgraded, I rebooted the box and it had no network interfaces.
After messing with udev and dmesgs for a while, I was able to find this in a log file
Feb 15 14:29:34 sentry kernel: [ 1856.770927] Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2 v1.7.5 (April 29, 2008) Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.257121] firmware: requesting bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.450033] bnx2: Cant load firmware file bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.450033] bnx2: probe of 0000:05:00.0 failed with error -2 Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1857.833817] firmware: requesting bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1858.185818] bnx2: Cant load firmware file bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw Feb 15 14:29:35 sentry kernel: [ 1858.185818] bnx2: probe of 0000:09:00.0 failed with error -2
After finding that, I asked a co-worker to manual download the package through a browser on a different machine, put it on a CD, and manually place the file as /lib/firmware/bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw.
With the file now there I needed to try to reload that module
modprobe -r bnx2 modprobe bnx2 /etc/init.d/networking restart
Lo and behold, I now had network. With the network working, I wanted to install the proper debian package: firmware-bnx2, which is found in non-free, which I already had in /etc/apt/sources.list, but first, I needed to get rid of the file I put in there, in case it messed anything
rm /lib/firmware/bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw apt-get install firmware-bnx2
I rebooted to make sure that it was going to work. Later it came to me that there was a much simpler solution to this problem, reboot, and in the grub menu, pick the etch kernel, it should boot with network, install firmware-bnx2 and reboot to the new kernel. I had not thought of that until later though.
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[...] Overall the migration from etch to lenny across several servers was easy, except for one back. More here One server required the bnx2 firmware for a Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC. For one reason or another, [...]