I purchased a used MBF2M516A-EEEOT (Bluefield-2) from third-party seller. Before purchasing, the seller informed me that the unit I bought does not include 1GbE out-of-band (OOB) management.
As a result :
I initially connected an Ethernet cable to the oob_net0 RJ45 port, but there was no link activity
Then i tried using a USB-to-RJ45 adapter, but again there’s no network connectivity
(I also checked for potential thermal issues, but the board temperature is within normal operating range)
Since my unit lacks OOB management, what is the recommended way to establish internet access on this device? Are there alternative network interfaces or configuration steps I should try?
I need connectivity mainly to install packages like meson via apt for DOCA application development and system updates.
Thanks for your question.
If oob port is not working, you may be able to connect the card to the internet via rshim interface tmfifo_net0. (BF2 internet traffic will be routed via host, so the host should have an internet access to make it working)
In this case you will need to install rshim driver on the host the BF2 card is connected to, start rshim service, set an IP 192.168.100.1/30 on tmfifo_net0 port on the host side, enable net.ipv4.ip_forward and then configure masquerading of all the traffic via the host port that the internet traffic is routed to.
For example:
On the host (use the relevant host interface name with the default route instead of eno1 here)
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eno1 -j MASQUERADE
sysctl -a | grep ip_forward
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
The usb port on the BF2 card is for console access only.
i.e.
If you connect this usb port to another server and install rshim driver, you can start rshim service, and access the BF2 card console using Putty or minicom tools.
i.e.
minicom -D /dev/rshim0/console
When you connect the console, it doesn’t allow the card to access the internet, only console.
