[lug] [OT] Solaris device names

Bill Jorgensen jorg at sysmgrs.com
Wed Feb 14 21:11:10 MST 2001


On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, John Starkey wrote:

> It appears that Sun changed the device names for NICs several times from
> 2.x to 8. So what are the current device names? I've seen. hme0, dlan0,
> lan0, and le0 (for the first card of course).

Actually, the designation will let you know the throughput and type of 
ethernet card you have. If you see an le0 that corresponds to a NIC that
is set to 10Mbit. You can find this on older Sun servers (1000's) and
workstations (Sparc 4's and 5's). You can find le0's on Ultra 1's as
long as the Ultra 1 does not have a server system board. When Sun left
behind the old sun4d and sun4m architecture they left behind the le0. 
BTW, lo0 is the internal loopback.

hme* corresponds to 100Mbit cards. These are found on sun4u (Ultra
architecture) machines. You can add an hme* to a sun4m or sun4d, but it is
an extra purchase. hme's are part of the sun4u architecture. qfe's are
known as quad fast cards. They are 100Mbit and an extra purchase. You can
get cards for pci or sbus machines.

You will have another designation for FDDI interfaces and the ones that you
listed. I am most familiar with the le's, hme's and qfe's.

> When I boot with a new card it's config'ing it (completely I think), or
> atleast it's bring up the config window and listing an "ethernet
> controller". But ifconfig -a isn't showing anything. And it's not
> creating a hostname.whatever file. prtconf -D isn't returning anything
> that resembles a card.

Unless you config the interface at OS install time you usually have to make
the hostname.<interface> file in /etc. You can put the IP or the name in
that file. If you put the name in the hostname.<interface> file you have to
have it properly referenced in the /etc/inet/hosts file.

To plumb the interface you would use this:

ifconfig hme0 plumb

You have to plumb the interface first in order to config it. You can do it
all at reboot time if you have all the info within /etc/inet/hosts and
/etc/hostname.<interface>.

Later,

Bill

-- 
*--------------------------------*
  UNIX... spoken with hushed and 
  reverent tones.
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