Server does not detect network card anymore (as if the card was gone)

Written by - 0 comments

Published on - Listed in Network Hardware Rant


In September 2010 I wrote a post about a weird phenomenon on a network interface which somehow seemed "stuck" and which caused the operating system (SLES11) to not recognize the network card anymore. 

Now its 2015 and something very similar, if not the same, happened to me again. 

On a newly racked server I tried to install RHEL7 and booted from the installation dvd. In the graphical installation routine, the network card was not detected. I could confirm this in the BIOS where the network card was not listed under PCI devices:

No network card detected

After physical verification on site, the network card was very much there and two nics of four were patched. The nic led's were steady green. Yet the server still didn't recognize the card.

Steady NIC LED

I have tried a couple of reboots without success until I unplugged the RJ45 cables. The nic led's went off, I waited for a couple of seconds and replugged the cables. Now the leds started blinking. I launched another reboot and hey - the network card was finally being "seen" by the server. In BIOS and in the RHEL installation as well.

Network card detected in BIOS

It seems that there was a similar issue as I experienced back in 2010. The network card somehow froze after a signal from the network cables, so it couldn't communicate with the motherboard anymore. I'm looking forward to hearing some other theories or even a confirmation. :)


Add a comment

Show form to leave a comment

Comments (newest first)

No comments yet.

RSS feed

Blog Tags:

  AWS   Android   Ansible   Apache   Apple   Atlassian   BSD   Backup   Bash   Bluecoat   CMS   Chef   Cloud   Coding   Consul   Containers   CouchDB   DB   DNS   Database   Databases   Docker   ELK   Elasticsearch   Filebeat   FreeBSD   Galera   Git   GlusterFS   Grafana   Graphics   HAProxy   HTML   Hacks   Hardware   Icinga   Influx   Internet   Java   KVM   Kibana   Kodi   Kubernetes   LVM   LXC   Linux   Logstash   Mac   Macintosh   Mail   MariaDB   Minio   MongoDB   Monitoring   Multimedia   MySQL   NFS   Nagios   Network   Nginx   OSSEC   OTRS   Office   OpenSearch   PGSQL   PHP   Perl   Personal   PostgreSQL   Postgres   PowerDNS   Proxmox   Proxy   Python   Rancher   Rant   Redis   Roundcube   SSL   Samba   Seafile   Security   Shell   SmartOS   Solaris   Surveillance   Systemd   TLS   Tomcat   Ubuntu   Unix   VMWare   VMware   Varnish   Virtualization   Windows   Wireless   Wordpress   Wyse   ZFS   Zoneminder