Beware of Intel NIC driver updates

formortals@thesophist.com — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:49:00 GMT

I had a pretty harsh experience tonight. I have one of Intel's server grade NICs in my ISA server at work. It has a lot of IP addresses bound to the external adapter. We updated the NIC's driver due to some odd behavior we were seeing (some of the ports were not being detected sometimes after a cold boot). Well, the installer decided to pick one of the IP addresses assigned to each port to make the primary IP address, and to drop all of the other IP addresses bound to thew adapter. So instead of the 5 minutes of downtime we expected, I got to spend an hour re-typing the critical IP addresses, and another hour tomorrow typing in the non-critical IP addresses. Let this be a warning: if you plan on updating the drivers for your Intel NIC, plan on possibly needing to re-configure it afterwards!

J.Ja

Justin James' Critical Thinking

Beware of Intel NIC driver updates