Cfrtjryk

I have a ProLiant DL360 g7 server that was running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I was trying to update the OpenSSH version, but without wanting, my server got upgraded to Ubuntu 16.10. Since then, I have "lost" my NIC cards as the ifconfig does not show them up.

The first thing that I found in google was that the NIC naming system has changed from eth0 to eno1.

When I do

sudo ifconfig eno1 up

I get the error:

Can't load firmware file “bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1a.fw”

SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory 

By doing

dmesg | grep bnx2

it recognises my 4 interfaces mentioning the old ethX naming and in the end:

Can't load firmware file “bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1a.fw”

Then

ip link

shows:
my four interfaces with the new naming style: eno1, eno2, enp5s0f0 etc

I have also renamed the main interface in /etc/network/interfaces to correspond to eno1.

If i do

ifconfig eno1

I get what I would expect from ifconfig under normal situation: the right IP assigned in eno1 (i.e. inet, netmask, etc and all counters for packets and errors are 0)

locate bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1a.fw

initially returned 1 path: /lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1a.fw. I copied this file, along with other bnx2 files, to:

/lib/firmware/3.2.0-55-generic/bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1a.fw

Finally,

uname -r shows:

3.2.0-55-generic
and

cat /etc/lsb-release

mentions;
Ubuntu. 16.10, yakkety

I feel quite lost in what options I have. I believe the updated system is not recognising my NIC cards and I do not know what I should do.

Other people give a solution for Red Hat (bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1b.fw") which involves rebuilding the initramfs image in red Hat, but not sure whether this is the direction I should take or how this can be done in Ubuntu. Any help greatly appreciated.

You're almost there. I had almost the same exact problem, except our server had a directory of /lib/firmware/bnx2x (note the extra "x"). I fixed it by creating
mkdir /lib/firmware/bnx2 and then from your linked solution downloaded the bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1b.fw file into there and ran update-initramfs -u and rebooted and voila. Note that your error is looking for a filename slightly different, ending in 1a.fw, not 1b.fw.