Re: Mid-December update on bordeaux.guix.gnu.org

[Andreas Enge]

Hello!

Am Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 04:48:21PM +0000 schrieb Christopher Baines:
> As for build machines, milano-guix-1 came back online today, which is
> great. I believe harbourfront is still unusable through (broken hard
> drive).

We spent an hour in the server room with a colleague and tried to get the
machine running again. I put a spare SATA III SSD into a hard drive slot
that was labelled SAS; when booting, the SSD was recognised with its brand,
so I suppose this should work.

When booting on the graphical installer USB key, it complains about missing
firmware; the last messages are:
[17.44] udevd[186]: no sender credentials received, message ignored
[17.96] Error: Driver 'pcspkr' is already registered, aborting...
[41.30] 0000:03:00.0 Missing free firmware (non-Free firmware loading is 
disabled)
[41.30] bnx2: Can't load firmware file "/*(DEBLOBBED)*/"
(The last two lines are repeated twice.)

It would be helpful if it told us which firmware it could not load; I would
not consider this advertising for the non-free firmware, but useful
information on which device is blocked...

A web search reveals this:
bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-6.2.1b.fw"

This is apparently a Broadcom network card:
   https://packages.debian.org/stretch/firmware-bnx2

The strange thing is that when installing harbourfront for the first time,
we exchanged its network card so that it would work with the Guix free
drivers, and until we took out the hard disk, it was running GuixSD just
fine.

Do you have any idea what could be wrong?

Andreas