Disabling NIC Fan montoring

mira-dta

First, Thank you kind stranger for your assistance, whether you can point me in the right direction or not, it warms my heart that you clicked on this thread.

one of the fans on my 10G NIC is making an ugly sound, so i replaced it. Now because the new fan spins slower than the original one the driver is not liking the tach signal, so my mom of a NIC driver yells at me with the following error:

![0_1604792851494_fan err.jpg](Uploading 100%)

Error trace:

bxe1: Warning: SPIO5 hw attention
bxe1 Warning: Fan Failure on Network Controller has caused the driver to shutdown the card to prevent permanent damage.  Please contact OEM Support for assistance
bxe1: bxe_fan_failure (build/ce-crossbuild-245/sources/Free-BSD-srd/sys/dev/bxe/bxe.c,7027)

So my question is: Given that we are a loose cannon that does not play by the rules, and are willing to accept any consequence when the router explodes, is there a way for us to turn off this annoying error? Or is this a FreeBSD thing and we need to recompile the aforementioned driver and somehow get FreeBSD to make use of that instead?

Thanks!

mira-dta

***photo didn't upload for some reason.
fan err.jpg

also the nic is one of these

Dell Broadcom 57810S Dual Port 10GbE PCIe Converged Network Adapter w/SFP+ N20KJ

stephenw10

Hmm, looks like it's hard coded, there is no tunable to prevent that:
https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-src/blob/RELENG_2_4_5/sys/dev/bxe/bxe.c#L7026

Steve

oldlongjohnson

You will have to use eDiag tool to shut off the fan warnings, its baked into the firmware of the card. See here:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32505518-

TLDR if you know what youre doing, you set bitflag 83 to 1.

If you arent familiar with eDiag, check the first post in that thread, it has some basic instructions and a download link (Scroll down to "How-to enable 2.5g capability via DOS eDiag" section, thats what theyre using it for). Basically, its a bootable firmware config program for broadcom/qlogic cards, which yours is. Careful messing with that program though, you can obviously put the card into an unworkable state if you dont know what youre doing. Be extra sure and doublecheck your changed values before writing anything to the card.

provels

I'd probably just get the fan that operates at the expected speed. You don't really want to cook the card because you never knew the fan failed.

mira-dta

@stephenw10 Thanks, that helped a a lot, i ended up re-compiling this bit of the FreeBSD Kernel. And got rid of the entire message.

stephenw10

My preference here (if you can't use a fan that doesn't trigger it) would be to disable it in the NIC firmware using eDiag. Using a modified driver will require you to compile it for every new release that uses a significantly different base. It will fail to boot at upgrade.

Steve

provels

PS - Do you know the card is being cooled sufficiently with the new fan? Just a thought.

mira-dta

@provels
Oh yes indeed, I know the thermal solution is good enough due to 3 reasons,

Under full load, the heatsink is only slightly warm to the touch, Took the liberty of reapplying thermal paste during the fan swap.
There's versions of the qlogic 57810 that's just passively air cooled so even with no fan it should be fine. Our card is in an atx pc case with plenty of airflow just in case.
We turned off the fan protection, not the thermo protection. those will still work if anything happens.

mira-dta

@stephenw10
if this was my job and im doing it for work, new fan would definitively be my preference too, this is just something we cobbled together from e-waste for our home network, not a big deal if it catch fire and explodes or something. Which is why we are really scrappy with our solution.

stephenw10

I understand. I would still try to disable it in ediag just so you don't have to maintain the driver yourself or struggle with upgrades.

Steve