Do you you DHCP to get the IP Address for your Solaris Server or workstation then its worth understanding what your DHCP Agent by default requests for from the DHCP server and help avoid certain network issues like “unknown” hostname issue as I’ve descrbed here.

The DHCP Agent by default requests for the

Subnet Mask

Default Router

Hostname

DNS Domain

Broadcast Address

Encapsulated Vendor Option (vendor specific information as described in RFC 2132)

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If you are using DHCP to receive IP Address for your Sun Solaris system, you may end up with no hostname assigned to the system. This can be confirmed when there is no hostname at the prompt or if the output for the command “hostname” is as follows:

# hostname
unknown

or the /etc/hosts file has an entry as follows:

# cat /etc/hosts
#
# Internet host table
#
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.0.3 unknown # Added by DHCP

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IP Multipathing (IPMP) in Sun Solaris enables the load balancing capabilities and resilience for Network connections with multple Network Interface Cards (NIC).

I discussed here about providing resilience for network connections with multiple NICs on the system. Now, we take it to the next step and make the network connections not only resilient but also load balance the network connections such that both the NICs participating in IPMP are active and forwards traffic. This improves the network throughput and thereby efficiency of the server especially if it is a critical system serving multiple connections.
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In SPARC Servers running Sun Solaris, you can see multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs) or interfaces are all sharing a single MAC-Address than having a unique Factory-default MAC-Address assigned to it. This is because by default, a System-Wide MAC-Address is assigned to all the NICs and hence a ifconfig -a output will show only one MAC-Address.

To confirm this behaviour

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IP Multipathing (IPMP) in Sun Solaris enables the load balancing capabilities and resilience for Network connections with multple Network Interface Cards (NIC).

IPMP is mostly used to provide resilience with network connections wherein a Sun Solaris Server with multiple NICs can be configured such that if the primary NIC fails it automatically failover to the secondary NIC on the system. Also, if it is a multi-switch environment then each Network Interface participating in IPMP can be connection to two different switches such that a network connection failure due to a NIC failure or a switch failure can be avoided.

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The Default Gateway or the Default Router is the IP address (IPv4) to which all the traffic to any target destination(s) which does not have a route in the Routing Table of the server will be forwarded.

This Default Gateway is maintained in the file

/etc/defaultrouter [IPv4 only]

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Adding or editing the IP address on a Solaris 10 server is different from the previous versions of the OS (Solaris 9, Solaris 8 etc).

In the previous versions of the Solaris Operating System, you need to edit the /etc/hosts file and add/edit the entry for the IP address and the hostname.

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To add a Static Route in Sun Solaris operating system, you can use the route command. This will dynamically update the Kernel IP Routing table. However, when a server is restarted, these routes will be lost. To prevent this from happening, add a startup script S76static-routes with all the route commands for the static route that needs to persist. This will ensure that the route gets added at boot time.

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