HP NC360T - Network Intermittently Unresponsive

[BigPines]

I have been running an EXPI9301CTBLK Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter NIC in Lion for a couple of years. I did have to add it's device ID to IONetowrkingFamily.kext each time I did an OS update which was a bit of a hassle but the thing was rock solid. Upon upgrading to Mountain Lion, I found this NIC no longer worked even if I added the device ID to the kext. Maybe I was just doing something wrong this time.

Because I was tired of messing with kexts, wanted something that worked OOB, and wanted a dual NIC I could aggregate, I decided to pick up the HP NC360T. It was reported to work OOB: http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.8.2#Wired_.28Ethernet.29 and seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.

The NC360T is recognized OOB and initially seems to work, but I am having a strange intermittent problem with it. Every so often the connected port will stop responding (I haven't aggregated the ports yet). The Network preference pane shows it is still connected and an ifconfig shows it active but it doesn't seem to work at all. In order to get it to respond, I either have to:

reboot

- OR -

sudo ifconfig en0 down
sudo ifconfig en0 up

Usually within a few minutes of reviving it in this manner, the port becomes unresponsive again.

I am hopeful another NC360T owner can help me solve this problem. If not, I will be looking to buy yet another NIC that actually works OOB reliably. What NICs actually work reliably in Mountain Lion? I have heard the Rosewill RC-401-EX works well. It is a single port card and I'd rather have dual ports but at this point, I just want something that works reliably OOB.

Any help is appreciated.

Mike

 

[BigPines]

For anyone having similar issues, I thought I would come back and post my solution.

The problem (at least in my case) was heat. My NIC was under constant heavy load and it was overheating. I placed a fan near the NIC and all my stability problems disappeared.

Again, the symptoms are:

1) Network setting in system preferences shows the NIC port is connected
2) ifconfig reports status active for the port
3) No network traffic seems to be getting through the port
4) "sudo ifconfig en0 down; sudo ifconfig en0 up" returns the port to working status
5) NIC may be under heavy load
6) NIC may be hot to the touch

I hope this helps someone else.

Mike

 

[zonar1982]

I also had the same problem.

I have a backup server and my entire backup is over 6TB. The realtek NIC got fried after a couple of months, constantly kept crashing.

I purchased the HP NC360T which is a little better but I still have issues, now I put a fan directly underneath. Curious to see what happens.

There is a strange issue where I can only get one NIC port to work on gigabit, the second one remains on 100Mbps. Even when I try to manually configure the port.

Do you have any issues like that?

Cheers,
K.

 

[ctyrider]

Similar issues with NC360T here - sporadic hangs, recoverable by ifconfig down/up. I find the "heat" theory a bit hard to believe, as my computer is in unheated basement, where it's about 25 degrees right now.

Anyone had any success with any other NICs, or tried to install these SmallTree drivers that were mentioned before?

 

[jwk]

If you haven't already seen this thread, see posts #26 & #27 plus #18 and see if this resolves your issues:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/network/72082-how-get-wake-lan-working-z77-boards-hp-nc360t-3.html

 

[shahar]

I have the same issue.

My NC360T is detected as en0 & en1, OB-LAN (GA-X79-UD5 F12 bios) is disabled.
en0 & en1 is achieved via DSDT edit.

followed the posts mentioned, removed the DSDT edit and did injection instead, the issue still exists.

help anyone?

Thanks.

 

[shahar]

I have the same issue.

My NC360T is detected as en0 & en1, OB-LAN (GA-X79-UD5 F12 bios) is disabled.
en0 & en1 is achieved via DSDT edit.

followed the posts mentioned, removed the DSDT edit and did injection instead, the issue still exists.

help anyone?

Thanks.

Got a bit frustrated with this, so I took a different approach.
wrote a small application which pings a stable device on the network all the time and once it misses on more than two pings, it executes ifconfig <interface name> down && ifconfig <interface name> up.

Note: The application needs to be run in sudo - and it requires one terminal window open all the time right now. I plan on getting it to be a login item which will ask for credentials once upon login, but right now it works

sometime is the only way...

 

[zookini13]

I bought this same HP card about a couple of weeks ago and it was working flawlessly OOB until last night when I started seeing the same issues with loss of connectivity as others have described previously. My onboard i217v interface is disabled in the BIOS and the HP360T shows up as en0/en1 with built-in status. In normal use it works fine and I've tested transfers to and from my NAS with 15-20 GBs of files with no issues and it's also seemingly fine in Windows. However, whenever I start streaming a video from my NAS using Air Video Server HD (NAS->hackintosh->iPad) it seems to fall over within about 10 mins. As others also experienced, re-enabling the connection seems to bring it back up for a short period but it always seems to fail again shortly after the first failure. The streaming part has been working perfectly for the last couple of weeks so I'm not sure what suddenly changed to cause the issue.

I saw a suggestion that heat might be the issue and added another case fan beside it but it didn't seem to help and given that it could transfer several GBs of files without a problem then it seems odd that it would fail when streaming a video with a total size of less than 1GB.

I tried installing the SmallTree drivers and removing the standard Intel driver from within the IONetworkingFamily kext but even after fiddling about with the IOPCIPrimaryMatch strings and removing the IOPCISecondaryMatch entry the kext would still not get loaded. If someone has managed to get the SmallTree drivers working with the NC360T then I'd very much appreciate if you could share how you managed it.

Not really sure how to proceed from here but I'll probably try updating pfSense on my router and swapping out the switch as neither of those will cost anything to try. Any further suggestions would be much appreciated. Really a bit bummed by this as I thought I'd finally got a simple and reliable networking setup on my hack.

 

[_mikey]

I bought this card as well to try to fix the frequent drops under load of my onboard intel (H87N and Z87N boards) nic. The card is even worse :-/ it fails immediately on any kind of heavy load like copying or downloading large files.

Is there any way we can log or find out some detail about why the nic crashed? I have a very repeatable case with the HP/intel PCI card. The onboard intel fails much more randomly, but seemingly in the same way (lose network and ifconfig en0 down and up will restart it fine)

Also, most people report failures while transferring to and from a NAS, is everyone using SMB? I'll do some tests without NAS access (writing to local directories) to test it out.

PS to the above poster, I actually am able to run Air Video Server pretty reliably with the onboard intel nic, did not get far enough with the PCI card to try. But my setup is the same, NAS -> hack -> ipad.

 

[zookini13]

I did some further testing and replicated the Air Video Server HD setup in Windows 8 and there were no issues at all so as far I can tell the issue is not a hardware fault but somehow specific to OsX/Mavericks. I've booted into Mavericks a few times since yesterday where the card would show as being up and working but would not connect, and for whatever reason when I clicked on the menubar to check the System Report the system crashed and rebooted. This has never happened before so it almost feels like things are getting worse.

On another note, "About This Mac" -> "System Report" showed the card to be running at 2x link width (PCIe) despite the fact that I have it setup on the secondary graphics card slot which supports up to 8x. I recalled previously seeing it showing up as 4x link width and seeing how I'd updated my BIOS about a week ago (about a week before the issues started) I rolled the BIOS version back to the previous one and sure enough it shows up at 4x again. I've not tested it yet so can't confirm if that's the issue but will update once I have.