This should get filed under the ‘I need to remember this for the next time it happens’ category.

Installing  OSSIM 2.3.1 (Debian based Open Source SIEM system)  onto a Dell Poweredge 1950 would succeed but the network would not function.  Doing an ‘rmmod bnx2′ and ‘modprobe bnx2′ would resolve the problem but it was no useful answer for a production system.

It turns out that the firmware isn’t installed for the Broadcom NIC as shown by the dmesg entries:

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw

bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw"

Simple answer to get running – download the firmware-bnx2 0.26 from http://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-bnx2, copy it to the target system and perform a dpkg -i firmware-bnx2_0.26_all.deb.  This will trigger a rebuild of the initrd, so you should be able to do a restart and have networking available straight away:

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-rv2p-06-4.6.16.fw

eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz found at mem f4000000, IRQ 16, node addr 00:15:c5:eb:0f:d7