Solaris Networking

May 4, 2005 2:53 am General

For a while my Dell Optiplex 280 has sat on my desk. It’s been a long term plan to get it installed with Solaris x86. After getting one set of pre-GA disks, I tried my first install [feeling like I’m back in Debian land without a nice GUI installer] to no avail. A few builds later and some more CDs shipped from Ireland, we were up and running in no time. All good, and JDS looking pretty darn nice.

Then it sat unconnected on my desk for a while, until today when I finally decided to figure out the networking. Now networking scares the willies out of me. Plain and simple – it’s voodoo. I remember doing a Solaris admin course a few years ago, but unfortunately didn’t have any of the course notes to hand. Time to google search.

I found a nice introductory site about how to setup the network, and then realized that my ethernet wasn’t being recognized. On forums.sun.com where someone else had a similar experience with their ethernet device. All good so far. I tried the current bge driver, but that didn’t seem to work. I found a Broadcom driver, downloaded it, and learned out to get mass storage working under Solaris 10. Kill vold, mkdir /rmdisk, and reboot was enough to cure that, and quickly transferred it over using my compact flash card. Sweet.

Installing the package was relatively easy, although I had to re-run the postinstall scripts since there was already pci devices registered in my driver_alias file – pretty scarey. Reboot, and still no beans. Figured out the pci device number from a prtconf, added that to the alias file, created hostname.bcme0 and dhcp.dcme0 to get DHCP working, and reboot to get working network for a few minutes…until –

WARNING: bcme: coding error detected, the driver is using ddi_dma_attr(9S) incorrectly. There is a small risk of data corruption in particular with large I/Os. The driver should be replaced with a corrected version for proper system operation. To disable this warning, add 'set rootnex:rootnex_bind_warn=0' to /etc/system(4).
WARNING: pci14e4,1677 - bcme0: Failed to bind handle!

Bugger.

Wandered around the web again, and noticed that there was an updated driver available – I had stupidly downloaded the driver from some random site, without checking with Broadcom first. Downloaded the package, installed it, and after a quick reboot, hey presto it worked out of the box. More than can be said about the last 2 releases of Ubuntu, unfortunately.

So it wasn’t really that hard afterall, and it was probably good experience to get used to some of the Solaris commands and file locations [shudder], but expecting my mother to do this is another thing. We have a long way to go.

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