Replaced internal network card, now the secondary card shuts down on boot

[Naturalize]

Hi i have a Dell poweredge r620 with the intel i350 4 port card as the "built in" NIC. I was having issues with it randomly shutting off and further research showed that just happens sometimes. well i don't want that to happen so i bought a tplink ethernet card. installed it and set it as the primary NIC in VE with the gateway and IP assignment and everything was fine.

While doing some research, i found i could buy a compatible broadcom NIC for the dell "built in" proprietary port. so i buy one

I plug it all in and in UEFI everything checks out. it boots into proxmox, but once it boots into proxmox, the tplink card shuts off. all lights go off on it and i can't find it on the network. i plug into the "new" broadcom NIC and lights go up so i know the network is on and the cable didn't get damaged. But i can't access VE through that because those ports have no IP assignment.

i just need this to work so i can change my default NIC to the broadcom, instead of the tplink. any ideas as to what i could do or why this is happening?

I have the ability to plug in a monitor and login with CLI but I'm not great at this and can't figure out exactly what i can do through CLI to change it, even just temporarily, so i can get into VE and change the defaults.

small update: i put the intel card back in and the TP link card is working in proxmox now. is it possible that the broadcom card has different names and is somehow changing the name of the TP link when i plug it in?

thanks in advance, and apologies if i'm missing something.

 

[j.theisen]

Hi @Naturalize

thanks for posting on the forum!

You might be running into the issue that different NICs get enumerated differently in the Linux kernel and such the name of the interfaces change.

small update: i put the intel card back in and the TP link card is working in proxmox now. is it possible that the broadcom card has different names and is somehow changing the name of the TP link when i plug it in?

If you currently have a working setup with the TP link card installed you can use the pve-network-interface-pinning tool [1] to assign a fixed name to all the NICs currently present in the server.

After this is applied you should be able to replace the Intel NIC with the Broadcom one without losing the configuration for your TP Link's port(s).

That being said, if you changed the NIC and the server is still not accessible afterwards, please check the current status of the NICs with ip a .
If your TP Link NIC shows DOWN or has no IP configuration applied to it, take note of the name on the left and compare it to the contents of /etc/network/interfaces .
If the names do not match, rewrite it in the file and run ifreload -a .

If you have questions feel free to ask.

Best regards
Jonas

[1] https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Networ...=Using the pve-network-interface-pinning Tool