Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

With the recent February CTP release of Longhorn Server I finally decided that since my Dell PowerEdge 2900 hasn't really been fully configured. It'd be a good time to give Vista... err Longhorn Server a shot.

I'm still waiting in limbo for my fresh install with Exchange 2007 (waiting on that one little app that will make it all work like magic) on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition x64 R2 (PLEASE PLEASE let them have some common sense with naming sometime this century).

The install of Longhorn Server went perfectly. I didn't even have to provide drivers for my Dell PERC 5/i RAID controller which is awesome and as expected. The entire install took only 15 minutes which is great considering it's a quad core server with 4GB of 667MHz FB-DIMM's. I noticed right away that the no network connection icon was down there in the system tray so I immediately went to Device Manager. The two embedded NIC's (Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708C's) were just showing as Ethernet adapters.

Figuring first that the 2003 x64 drivers would work I went to the big RAID driver I've got, it wasn't there. No biggy, it's probably not mounted. Popped open Disk Management saw 3265GB (RAW) and nearly died of a heart attack. Remaining calm (knowing Microsoft couldn't have just done something so stupid as wipe my drive), I gave the unmounted partition a drive letter and crossed my fingers as it was assigned to R: and showed the right amount of free space and NTFS. Now I'm sure the PM that thought this was a good idea had the best intentions but for the love of god man think again. Don't you ever scare me or anyone else like that again. RAW == brand new drive / empty drive / drive with nothing on it. Don't you dare say that my 3TB array is empty. List it as UNMOUNTED and pop a bloody dialog stating that I need to assign a drive letter. The last thing you want is some system admin working away on 100's of systems to just format a drive with critical data on it.

I tried installing the NIC drivers from Dell and they didn't work. I then tried the drivers from Broadcom for the NetXtreme II 5708C and they didn't work. I then tried whatever Broadcom drivers came in Longhorn Server and those didn't work. Finally I Googled and found, this, so I then tried the RIS drivers and unfortunately those didn't work either. In fact Windows wouldn't even boot complaining about the driver's digital signature being unverified. So after trying every possible driver my 20 minutes with Longhorn Server is over and I'm going back to Server 2003. Maybe with Beta 3, maybe once Broadcom get there butts in motion (this isn't a bloody Creative soundcard guys it's a critical enterprise level NIC that's shipped on nearly ALL 9th gen Dell servers, you've got Vista RTM get moving, Server shouldn't be much of a leap). Clearly the issue is with the NDIS v5 Broadcom are using. And it's probably also the root cause of all the issues I've been having with Virtual Sever 2005 and this NIC back on Windows Server 2003 as well.

There's a part of me that just wants to give in and buy the Intel Pro/1000PT Dual Port PCIe x4 NIC and have the drivers built in and not have to worry but I'm not about to waste $170 on another NIC when I've got one that should be working perfectly. What a headache.