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by Anand M.
Original Post: Vista and Broadcom NetXtreme II
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Recently we got two Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers at work and I wanted to run them on the Longhorn server Beta 2. So I went ahead and installed LH Server, but then it could not recongnize the highend NetXtreme II Gigabit network card. None of the drivers shipped by Dell worked. The problem seems to be that these drivers use NDIS client 5 while LH server requires NDIS6. I tried to see if Vista will work, but Vista RC1 still had the same problem. So I was stuck with a server that could not connect to the network.
Then I found a link to a RIS driver at broadcom for Win2K3 (I am unable to find this link now and it looks like the Broadcom site structure has changed). The help said that this was based on a monolithic older architecture and limits access to some of the newer features in the NetXtreme card. So I just gave it a try, setting compatibility and it worked fine. The server is now online and I have full network access!!!