Hi CFSWC,   I also see this on my T420 and T320 - the server is powered off but there is still some traffic on all NICs. As the iDRAC is monitoring the health of the system, this must be one of the ways to check if the link is still up, so it constantly sends packages to see the state of the ports. So, yes, it is a normal behavior    It might be, that there are some options in the NIC that can reduce this sort of traffic maybe some EEE settings, but I do not recommend changing anything on this.   CheersStefan    
I recently purchased a Dell R620 and am working on bringing it up as a server.  I bought it used.  iDRAC has been reset to default.  BIOS updated to 2.9.  iDRAC updated to 2.65.65.65.  There are no drives installed, and the machine is in a powered off state.  I plugged in a NIC cable and saw a large amount of unusual activity on the NIC.  The unit has 2 10g ports and 2 1g ports on top of the iDRAC port.  Nothing is connected to iDRAC, and both 1g ports were connected.  While turned off, my switch is showing a steady ~6.5Mbps of traffic from the NIC.  Is this normal? [URL]
High network traffic on powered off machine