Windows 2003 x86, network duplex problem 2nd network card

[petesky]

Hello.

Proxmox 7.0 and latest 7.1 tested
VE container with W2K3 (currently virtio drivers 174)

Onboard network Intel (works fine) and PCIe extra card (has problems). First i had original Intel driver installed (E1000 in settings) so i thought the drivers are bad. Next changed PCIe to I219 but same problems. Now i switched over to RTL8125 and again same problems. No eventlog in Debian, no kernel log ...

I read a lot about network card problems with virtio drivers in W2K3 but it seems there is no real solution except disabling and re-enabling the card ? Any ideas why internal card works so far and PCIe makes (duplex conflict in W2K3 event log) and stopped working ?!

 

[Hannes Laimer]

Hey,

with "VE container" you mean a virtual machine, right? Just to make sure I understood correctly, you have PVE 7.1 setup and you're trying to pass a PCIe NIC through to the Windows 2003 VM.

Does the NIC you're trying to use work with other VMs, maybe with a newer version of Windows or another OS? Also, take a look at [1].

[1] https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_2003_guest_best_practices

 

[petesky]

Yes - its a VM (sorry). The NICs i tried all worked under Windows 10+. I also folllowed all best practices guide. The only problem is a duplex conflict appearing in windows evenlog (when using e1000). Whenever i use virtio drivers this will not happen but network card stop working after 1 and ... a few hours randomly. I cannot use passtrough due to mainboard capa so i set up 2 network cards and 2 brigdes. Thats all. I also tried to set 100M instead of 1G in virtio but this also wont work (dont know why). Changed cable multiple times, changed modem from ISP - always the same problem. I read a lot about this strange behavoir so i dont know its debian related, proxmox related or W2K3 related ?

 

[Hannes Laimer]

This seems to be a windows-related problem since it works with a newer version of windows. Make sure you have the correct drivers installed, other than that I'd probably recommend maybe updating to a newer windows version.

 

[petesky]

Latest virtio is 174 (afaik in 208) ... if i could set 100M permanently (no autoneg) it would be great but it wont work - dont know why.

 

[petesky]

Sorry for warming up. I noticed that this not belongs to W2K3 because it happens only when traffic is increasing. So it seems to be a problem of "high load" ? I also noticed a lot of other similar problems proxmox related when load is high. Please look into again or tell me how to debug. Thank you.

 

[Emilien]

Which Intel lan driver version are you using in windows 2003?

 

[petesky]

Latest virtio 174 (52.81.104.17400) which is packed in 208. Before i used E1000 NIC and original Intel drivers with same problem but one difference - the intel original driver told me a duplex conflict happend in eventlog after which i had to restart networking by commandline. With virtio drivers i never get any message in eventlog. I also tried all ethtools setttings in proxmox (disabling offload etc) but nothing works so far. I'm pretty sure its not windows related but who knows.

 

[Emilien]

When you tried with E1000 and Intel driver have you used the latest intel driver?
"Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 ships with drivers that do work, but the ones from intel are newer."*
* https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_2003_guest_best_practices

 

[petesky]

The W2K3 worked perfectly until mainboard defect so after switching to proxmox I used latest windows intel driver. First i tought its an ethernet card problem so i bought a new RTL8125 chipset (IB-LAN300 Icybox 2.5 card). I use it now with r8169 driver in modules. I know there are newer drivers but did not switch over because its a bit overkill for me. I think RTL8125 should be ok in proxmox and virtio in windows ... afaik i still belive its a "heavy load" issue in proxmox (debian) and not windows related ...

 

[Emilien]

The W2K3 worked perfectly until mainboard defect so after switching to proxmox I used latest windows intel driver. First i tought its an ethernet card problem so i bought a new RTL8125 chipset (IB-LAN300 Icybox 2.5 card). I use it now with r8169 driver in modules. I know there are newer drivers but did not switch over because its a bit overkill for me. I think RTL8125 should be ok in proxmox and virtio in windows ... afaik i still belive its a "heavy load" issue in proxmox (debian) and not windows related ...

There is a the new kernel 5.15 that support better RTL8125 as you can see another user already tested here.
Maybe you can give it a try.

 

[petesky]

Good morning. First thank you for your help. I noticed different problems that maybe solved.

1) Driver e1000 with original intel driver had duplex problems logged into eventolog which seems to be solved by virtio.

2) Not reachable WAN network card seems to be a configuration error under Windows. I have 2 network cards, one on WAN side and one on LAN side. On Windows i had LAN side TCP set GATEWAY address for a long time which could be wrong (worked under native windows but not under proxmox so far). So removing the GATEWAY IP (LAN side) removed the problem of being NOT reachable web server, ping etc after a period ot time (sometimes few minutes to some hours). I solved this before by disabling and re-enabling the network card under windows as suggested in other threads. So far, this problem did not happend for many days at the moment. Very interesting at this point (with wrong gateway set) is incoming traffic logged on proxmox brindge interface which seems not to be handled by windows for some reason. I will investigate further.

 

[petesky]

Hello everybody. Since two weeks i had no hickups so this issue seems to be solved by removing the gateway from network card on local LAN (windows 2003 VM). I dont know exactly why this not happens with same settings under native windows but anyway you can mark as solved maybe it helps others with similar problems. Thank you,