Sun

Have a little V100 box running Solaris 10, it makes an okay light-duty server. Has two fast ethernet interfaces

So far so good ... but the other day this foo unplugged the switch, both interfaces went down, the second one never came back up. This has happened before, dmfe1 is stubborn.

< ifconfig dmfe1 up > doesn't bring it up ...

I know I can reboot but stubborn. Is there a simple way to force the second interface into a running state ?

Yes, of course. BTW I'm far from an expert on this stuff but I don't see any difference in your two printouts. Did I miss something?
The interfaces already have ip addresses assigned. What isn't working?

If you're using dhcp I think it's something like



But that doesn't seem like it's the problem because the interfaces have ip addresses.

Static ip

See the RUNNING part missing from the second interface in the printout ? It's like a Cisco port that's administratively down. Everything is there but it doesn't work. Dead as a doornail.


That was the point I ifconfig dmfe1 upped it, no change. Also tried a few similar commands (plumb) with same result .... I'm not much of a Solaris prison either. Luckily, it usually doesn't give any trouble.

Haha I get it now. I saw the running or not, I meant between the two screenshots no difference. Ok. I'll get back to you in a few hours if nobody else does. I actually get along pretty well with Solaris. It's just that I can't keep all the different commands straight between the OS I have running over here. I'll have to bring up a box and try it. I'm not running all the machines I usually run because all my UPS batteries are now dead

I gave up and hit < reboot -- -r > It came back up with both interfaces without touching a thing. Every hint I could find of that problem on the innertubes was about a bad cable or switch but pretty sure that's not the problem here, since a reboot fixed everything.

Strange.

As long as you stick to the command line, it's pretty decent. Reliable as hell, that's for sure.

If this happens again try

ifconfig interface plumb up
ifconfig interface ipaddress

The other way is to check your configs, down the interfaces and do a "svcadm restart physical".

This should work, it's supposed to, but I tried it several times in different ways and it does not. I wonder what is going on that both interfaces go down when the switch powers off (that part makes sense) but only one comes back up ? Yet the second one says everything is correct, except it is not RUNNING. And it's not the cable or switch because a full reboot resets everything with no other chages..


Good idear. I will probly get another chance, that plug is too easy to disconnect by mistake ...

The only time I have seen NICs go away like that is on Winblows multiboots since Winbloze often disables NICs for power saving and then the other OS can't use it. Thankfully this can't be the case because there is no SPARC Winbloze AFAIK

Is this a NIC you installed or is it original equipment? It sounds like something is definitely wrong if only a reboot brings it back up(indicating needing a POR?)

to make an interface persistent in solaris do the following:

Thank, other. That's all correct, the interface is persistent, hardware-wise it's part of the mainboard (V100's don't have pci sockets : in fact they don't have any kind of peripherals). The first time it did this I immediately thought, "Oh shit, hardware failure" but when you reboot, both ports come back up fine. It's just that none of the ifconfig commands put dmfe1 into a running mode.

I'll try toxic's method next time and see what happens.