Mavericks Dropping Network connection on test Mac Mini server

I'm also seeing a similar issue. I have 4 Mac Minis (out of ~15 globally) which go "offline" every now and again. I've escalated this issue to both Apple enterprise support and McAfee enterprise support. No resolution so far. Two of the servers are plugged into Cisco Nexus core switches (US) and a third is plugged into a catalyst 3750 (Europe). I'm not sure what the 4th is plugged into since this server is a special case... All servers are running 10.9.2. The issue started when the servers still had 10.8 loaded on them. The only difference is when they went "offline" they also stopped recurring any logs. Now that we are on 10.9, the logs continue, but fill up with errors by the kernel.

One adapter I am using is an Apple one and the other is a Cisco adapter. Only problem with these two particular adapters is that they are 100mb max, but for troubleshooting they'll work for now.

Those of you that tried Tbolt adapters, maybe try a USB one.

No problem so far for me while using an Apple USB ethernet adapter.

hi

situation a lot more stable with usb adapter.... but god its too slow to be used in production...

our solution will be to update the OS of our cisco core... or move the server to other ip range on updated switches....

We are seeing this issue with one of our brand new Mac Mini's (10.9.3) connected to a Cisco 2960G switch. Has anyone narrowed down the issue?

I'm working with enterprise support from Apple and have been sending them logs and what not but still no solution. I just updated the servers to 10.9.3 and it's still happening.

One odd thing is the tech wanted me to grab some packet captures of the server while it was doing it and then run a sysdiagnose, however it won't ever drop pings while I'm running the packet capture. As soon as I stop capturing packets it will drop connection again. This is getting very frustrating.

hi

i have 2 situations...

situation 1 : cisco switch stack with 2 server with 10.9.X, with old Cisco OS : i have tons of network drops...

Situation 2 : cisco switch stack (same model as situation 1) with 2 same server 10.9.X as situation 1 with updated Cisco OS : No more drops...

So we are planning of doing the upgrade of the cisco os on the defective Stack this summer...

edit : on other thing... apple specialist told us that disabling the ARP inspection scan on the cisco switches would fix the problem... but we prefer doing the update...

@jmercier Can you find out exactly what 2 Cisco OS versions you did your tests with?

By any chance, are you seeing any of these errors in your System.log?

May 15 11:58:11 mac-01 kernel[0]: AppleBCM5701Ethernet [en0]:        8      5ea LimitMinFragSize: Unable to realloc packet

or

Mar 18 19:41:05 mac-01 kernel[0]: ctl_enqueuedata: m_allocpacket_internal(1072) failed

@cbrewer :

Cisco version not working : 12.2(55) SE1

Cisco version working fine : 15.0(2)SE5

Hey jmercier do you know what model Cisco switches and the OS that they are running where you aren't haven't any issues? I checked with Cisco and they have a newer OS for my 2960G switch, but they are now recommending the use of version 12 instead of 15. Seems a bit weird.

After doing some testing this morning I plugged our Mini in to an un-managed D-link switch that is plugged in to our Cisco 2960G and we had no network loss. I currently have it plugged in to a 2960S and have noticed a few pings timeout. I confirmed that neither switch has ARP inspection on.

Hi

switch not working ; WS-C3750E : version 12.2

switch working : WS-C3750X - version 15.0

We are seeing these issues too on a couple of Mac Minis connected to our Dell switches. Glad to see I'm not the only one. I hope they release a fix soon, but will start testing a workaround using USB adapters or unmanaged go between switches.

On the Mac Mini's ethernet port I set the hardware settings to Manual > 1000 Base-T > Full Duplex, Flow Control > Standard MTU > Unchecked AVB/EAV Mode and things seem to be much better so far.

Never mind on this one, it only worked good for about an hour and then started doing the same thing.

Not sure if this will help anyone else, but wanted to post just incase. I noticed one of our Mac Minis was not affected by the issue. The only thing different on it was it was on a different VLAN. So, I moved our other Mac Minis to VLANs other than VLAN1 and things are working great now.

We updated our Cisco switch from 12.2 to 15.0 and it did not resolve the problem for us.

what model of switch do you have ?

@jmercier

Cisco WS-C3560X-48 running 15.0(2)SE6

hummm thats weird... we got it working on switches 3750X with 15.0 SE5....

The next time you speak with someone from Apple, just tell them that it's been affecting access to iTunes. THAT will get them to care!

Any news on this issue, it's driving us crazy. We have tried upgrading our Cisco 3750 switches, but this did not work. We are also experiencing the issue on HP 2920. We did find out that if we plug into a Cisco 2960S the problem goes away.

We will have news pretty soon... we are planning on putting the update on our switch stack

We are still seeing it on our 3750 and 2960G with upgraded software.

I'm seeing this on new mac mini's as well. I've set up a new server with 10.9.3 and Server software. JSS version 9.32. I have the JSS on one mini and a DP set up on another mac mini that is running 10.9.3 as well. I have an xServe that is running a share on 10.6.8 Server as another DP.

When imaging machines today, I noticed that the mini running the DP lost it's ethernet connection for about a minute. This had caused one of the imaging machines to restart due to a timeout with the DP. Interestingly, other machines imaging from that DP did not restart due to a time out. Machines imaging from the xServe did not lose any connection.

From talking to the network admin here, the servers are not connected to Cisco switches. He had mentioned that they are on 3COM switches. If needed, I will find out which versions of switches they are.

I figured I would add my info here since I am seeing the same issues here, but with different hardware. I was going to look at updating the xServe to 10.9 as well, but with these issues showing on the minis...

When we noticed that thunderbolt to ethernet adapters don't work but the USB to ethernet adapters do work we looked into what chipset they use and they're both made by Broadcom. The fact that non Broadcom chips appear to not have the issue even on Mavericks suggest to me that it's probably an issue with the Maverick's Broadcom device driver.