Setting up a Sun Solaris Server to receive its IP address from a DHCP Server is fairly straight forward and is infact just a matter of setting up files on your Solaris Server.
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)
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
unknownor 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