After attaining a couple of Supermicro 1U Rackmount Servers I ran into a couple of problems with the NIC drivers and Ubuntu. While the latest version of ubuntu has the necessary drivers for the nics included in the system, older versions of Ubuntu have a hard time picking them up. In a nutshell what I was trying to accomplish was to move raided drives with Ubuntu 12.04 server installed on them to the new system, unfortunately no network connection was available due to the drivers not being loaded. The following helped in solving the problem with the i354 Ubuntu Drivers:

First of all ensure that make and gcc or g++ is installed in order to compile and install some files that we’ll be using.

sudo apt-get install make gcc g++

Next, tell the kernel to load some necessary modules at boot time.

sudo modprobe igb

sudo echo igb >> /etc/modules

You’ll now need to download these drivers for the Network Adapter Driver for 82575/6, 82580, I350, and I210/211-Based Gigabit Network Connections for Linux*, if you’re on the machine itself with no network connection you’ll have to save them to a drive and mount them up.

After downloading the drivers follow the steps below:

Move the base driver tar file to the directory of your choice. For example, use “/home/username/igb” or “/usr/local/src/igb”.
Untar/unzip the archive, where is the version number for the driver tar file: tar zxf igb-.tar.gz
Change to the driver src directory, where is the version number for the driver tar: cd igb-/src/
Compile the driver module:
Command To Use: make install
The binary will be installed as: /lib/modules//kernel/drivers/net/igb/igb.[k]o The install location listed above is the default location. This may differ for various Linux distributions.
Load the module using either the insmod or modprobe command:
modprobe igb insmod igb

That’s it! Drives with older Ubuntu versions should now be able to pick up the NICS, ensure your ip addresses are set and the devices on the interfaces are also properly defined.

I hope I saved others some hours of researching like I did.