[WinPE '05] Stamping Network Settings on right NIC/Port

[KrAzYxDx]

I'm running into an issue where WinPE is stamping the network information from wimbom.in to the wrong NIC port. I'll start with the single NIC example. We have DL380G5's with an onboard NC373i that has two ports. WinPE appears to enumerate these ports backwards (i.e. WinPE thinks Physical Port #1 is really Port #2 and Physical Port #2 is really Port #1). I believe this happens with some network adpaters when they use virtual buses. In any case, if the network cable isn't plugged into Port #2 then WinPE will obviously fail when it needs to reach out to the network.

I know an answer could be, "well just use Port #2 on those servers as your primary NIC", but that won't work for various reasons.

Any help/ideas appreciated. It needs to be automated as well.

Please let me know if you need more detail.

Thanks...

Edited April 2, 2009 by KrAzYxDx

[Noise]

Oh man, I know exactly what you are going through! A couple months ago I had to deploy 68 of these DL380 G5's and ran in to the same problem. The problem is that those On-Board Broadcom NIC's aren't PnP devices - they are tied to a virtual bus created by the drivers. You need to use a program called NetSet03 from Microsoft.

You are in for about two days of hacking to get this working. You can read more about it here.

By the way, WinPE isn't alone with this, you will have the same issues with Server 2003 - Pot assignment is completely random. I never did figure out how it was assigning ports, but I suspect it was the first port to receive a DHCP request was the first to be assigned. This drove me nuts for days. I even tried to use the CONREP.EXE hardware configuration utility from HP to hard-code the NIC's in WinPE (it doesn't help).

Good luck.

Edited April 2, 2009 by Nois3

[KrAzYxDx]

Can you use "netset03" in WinPE? That sounds more like post W2K3 to setup the NICs.

That's the first problem I'm tackling, but will definitely look at it for the post W2K3.