Installing a Network Card on Solaris x86

Prior to installing the physical network interface card (NIC), run the following commands:

# touch /reconfigure

# poweroff (init 5)

Make sure that the NIC is installed properly on PCI slot "X" of the PC’s motherboard.  Power on the machine and confirm that the BIOS is detecting the NIC card prior to driver installation.

To properly configure the new NIC, find out information about the installed NIC by performing the following command:

# /usr/bin/X11/scanpci

The command will output information about what devices are installed on your PCI slots.  To install the network card correctly, look for the vendor and device id.  The output should look like the following:

pci bus 0x0002 cardnum 0x00 function 0x00: vendor 0x14e4 device 0x165a 

   Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5722 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express

Add your driver alias by performing the following:

# add_drv –a –i ‘”14e4,165a”’ bge

OR

# vi /etc/driver_aliases

bge “14e4,165a”

wq!

# sys-unconfig

The machine will halt and then you will have to reconfigure your network card as well as other system related information.

Enable the network card

# ifconfig <DEVICE> plumb
# ifconfig <DEVICE> 192.168.1.xxx netmask 255.255.255.xxx up
# ifconfig –a

But wait if you just do that, next time you reboot, your entire configuration will be gone, to prevent this perform the following:

# vi /etc/hostname.<DEVICE>

Enter the following:

IP-address netmask + netmask
22.7.138.12 netmask + 255.255.255.224

Now edit /etc/inet/hosts & /etc/inet/ipnodes

IP-address hostname
22.7.138.12     jumpstart3

After that is complete, reboot -- -r (SPARC) or reboot (x86)

Then the next step that you can do is to add some routing to this configuration:

# route –p add default your-gateway
# route –p add default 192.168.2.1

-p = persistence over reboot

Default = all destination 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0

This will try to register a default gateway for the PC, if you want to add another routing for this PC to specified network you can do:

# route –p add –net network-address –gateway gateway-address

I suggest you always to use –p so that your routing won’t be flushed when the machine is reboot. Also you need your gateway in /etc/defaultrouter.

To check your routing you can type:

# netstat –rn

To flush your routing, but the one that from installation won’t be flushed

# route flush

These configurations at least will make your Solaris box able to communicate with other machine.