Thursday, March 27, 2008

Head's up - Win2k3 SP2 may cause networking issues

There's a lot of buzz going around about problems being caused by SP2. By default it turns on a lot of features like TCP/IP Offloading (TOE), and Receive-side Scaling (RSS) which can play havok on older network cards and apparently some newer boxes as well. There's a really good write-up on the problem from the exchange team at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/07/18/446400.aspx
which goes into detail on what is happening. If you've got anything weird going on with your servers since applying SP2, there's a good chance it's because of this.

I personally haven't run into problems on my exch 2k7 box with win2k3 x64 sp2 but I'm going to update my drivers now anyway just in case.

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