Marvel Yukon Ethernet Card connected to 3Com or HP switch

It’s been a long time since we had issues in group policy pushing to clients, running XP, Vista orWindows 7.Those issues were NOT found on all machines in our network/client networks. For more than one year we understood that something was wrong. Too many “usernev” (event id 1053 and 1052) error events in the event logs and generally latencies in network traffic. See more in http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=1053&eventno=1584&source=Userenv&phase=1

In the beginning we thought that this was due to issues of windows XP connected to w2k3 DCs over 1000 Mbit networks as Microsoft itself admits and released some fix ups. Anyway it was late December 2010 that we faced the same issue in a customer having a 100 Mbit network over an HP managed 100 Mbit Switch.Same issue but no gigabit….

In February the 15th 2011, we finished up some changes in our 1000Mbit network. New cat6e cabling, no intermediate switches and fully virtualized environment for all our servers. All workstations are now directly connected to our 3COM family switches. Right after this major change I personally saw eventID 1052 and 1053 in my Windows 7 Ultimate event log. I use a Sony Vaio VGN-NR21S/S which features a Marvel Yukon ethernet 10/100 Mbit card. As you may understand as an administrator I cannot stick to problems referring to solutions such as “contact your system administrator”…I should always ask myself :p????… I tried updating my drivers directly from Marvel Yukon web site….nothing. No change, still no correct group policy appliance, pings to local area network destinations timing out out of the blue – with no reason- and other network issues coming up every now and then.

We remembered that another client in our network experienced the same problem…such as the client with the 100 Mbit Lan mentioned above.

Appears to be a lucky guess. I visited the colleague’s office where we faced the this same problem, with a Realtek Chip enabled NIC in my hand. I check his nic brand….and got ya!!!! Marvel Yukon!. It is an on-board card, so I fire up the bios. We disable the on-board nic and put another PCI 10/100/1000 Mbit NIC that I had with me. Worked like a charm!!!

What about me now…I have a laptop, not a workstation….I put a smaller uplinked switch to the 3COM and immediately all problems were solved… Apparently, prior to the change in our cablings all IT Workstations were on a smaller switch uplinked to our 3COM switch family. So till that time I had not faced a problem like this. The colleague having the issue was directly connected to the master 3COM switches.

We made a crazy thought…what about the client with the HP switch? Bingo…2 servers and 3 clients having Marvel Yukon onboard cards…but this time on an HP 100 Mbit switch…We changed all 5 NICs and everything worked better than expected. Faster downloads, faster copying to NAS, successful group policy appliances and so on.

Are we missing a point here? Either it is a problem of Marvel Yukon itself, either it is combination problem resulted from Marvel Yukon connections to 3COM or HP business series switches. Actually HP has acquired 3COM a couple of years ago and I guess HP just puts its brand on switches rather than producing them itself.

I don’t know the solution to the problem since no network drivers changes, or switches firmware upgrades solved the problem.

At the time I cannot spend more time researching this, since I am into deep with some projects but I just know….DON’T USE MARVEL YUKON NICS WITH HP OR 3COM SWITCHES.

….once again loosing our hair in the name of technology everyday….fortunately I have a lot left and a lot of years to serve my job.

Good luck!

PS. If anyone has an idea why this happens, is more than welcome to post below 🙂

Special Thanks to PA

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