So, we started out with a rough day yesterday…Our offloaded NLB management point was having trouble connecting to our offloaded SQL server for one of our ConfigMgr 2007 sites. (yes, that’s a bit of offloading….). It really felt like a permissions/SPN issue. After looking at MP_Framework.log on each of the NLB MPs, we saw a couple different errors:
“CMPDBConnection::Init(): IDBInitialize::Initialize() failed with 0x80004005”
Clicking on the line that starts with MPDB ERROR, I see the following:
“[DBNETLIB][ConnectionRead (recv()).]General network error. Check your network documentation.”
Wow – in hind-sight, that seems pretty obvious – it didn’t at the time. To make a few-hours-long story short, we saw that our database server had unusually high Network Utilization of over 50%. We also saw that the higher the utilization, the more errors we saw on our NLB MPs (and secondary sites) in the MP_Framework.log file.
We then found the following in the System Event Log
“Broadcom BCM5708C: Network controller configured for 100 MB half-duplex link.” That’s our issue – our network port is definitely not configured for 100/Half… I’ve been told this is a ‘known issue’, but haven’t yet found it documented yet – so if you have any information, please share.
So, to do a quick check on other servers, I decided to run a PowerShell query – here’s the sample command line:
get-winevent -filterhashtable @{LogName="System";ProviderName="l2nd"} -computer myServerName | ft –autosize
This example queries “myServerName”, in the System Log, for Provider Name (a.k.a. Source) = “l2nd”, which is from a BroadCom NIC. To customize this a little more, I searched for only ID=8, and I also decided to sort descending based on the TimeCreated field.:
get-winevent -filterhashtable @{LogName="System";ProviderName="l2nd";ID=8} -computer myServerName| Sort-object `TimeCreated –descending
This allowed me to easily identify other servers that have encountered this issue. Luckily, it was only this one server.
Appendix A of this BroadCom Doc describes all the event log messages that are written to the System log by BroadCom.
More information on the get-winevent cmdlet.
We then configured the NIC properly, and all is well now.
Greg Ramsey | DELL
ConfigMgr MVP | DellTechCenter | @ramseyg | greg_ramsey@dell.com